podget: Getting the goods for you

Do people still listen to podcasts? I seem to remember podcasts being all the rage about 10 years ago, but I don’t hear so much about them now. Perhaps I am just not paying attention. 😐

Regardless, podget — as you might infer — does the job of yanking podcasts from servers, and managing them for you.

I haven’t seen many tools like this, but podget was quite easy to manage and set up. I seem to remember another one from a while ago that wasn’t so … cooperative.

Set up a server list at .podget/serverlist — or shamelessly steal the one included on the man page, like I did — declare a “library” (which is just a download target) and voila! You’re in business.

As I understand it (because I didn’t wrangle through all the little details) podget is also clever enough to clear out old files and retain only a number of recent files. It also arranges them in a nice tree. 🙂

And both the Debian and AUR descriptions suggest it’s intended to work from within cron, so it’s designed as a fire-and-forget background tool.

I can appreciate that, although I’d have to add that I don’t know of many tools that don’t play well with cron, unless they are just too blabby.

All of this boils down to:

1. If you know what a podcast is, and
2. if you listen to a lot of them, and
3. if you need a tool to download them, and
4. if you need a tool to clear them out periodically, and
5. if you want that tool to arrange them nicely, and
6. if you want that tool to play well with cron,

then podget might be the thing for you. Logical, yes?