+- cool tech zone zone (https://forum.cooltech.zone)
+-- Forum: Tangara (https://forum.cooltech.zone/forumdisplay.php?fid=3)
+--- Forum: General (https://forum.cooltech.zone/forumdisplay.php?fid=5)
+--- Thread: Beetscasts - managing podcasts for Tangara (/showthread.php?tid=221)
Beetscasts - managing podcasts for Tangara - kitinct - 2025-10-30
Beetscasts is a beets plugin for managing podcasts, it reads an opml file and downloads podcasts to a directory you specify. Additionally, it cleans up the audio tags on the podcasts by
- adding the name of the podcast in the Album tag if it isn't populated
- adding the title if it isn't populated
- writing "Podcast" to the MEDIATYPE tag
which makes them play nicely with Tangara's UI. Once downloaded, your podcasts can be managed with beets by adding the query `media
odcast` to any beets transaction you want to apply it to (and conversely, adding `^mediaodcast` to any transactions you do not want applied to podcasts) The way I use it is each morning I have my computer fetch any new podcasts, convert them, and then plug my SD card in. My computer then runs rsync -aPh <src> <dest> and sends everything to the SD card
You can find it here, please open any issues you have or send pull requests! Or just comment here I'll reply
RE: Beetscasts - managing podcasts for Tangara - kitinct - 2025-11-04
One thing I have noticed, after using it for a few days, is that iHeartMedia podcasts populate the artist tag with "iHeartMedia, Inc. © Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from iHeartMedia:" which is annoying and I'm unsure how to fix it, maybe it's because it's an unrecognized user-agent?
RE: Beetscasts - managing podcasts for Tangara - sbszine - 2025-12-08
Curl lets you spoof a desktop browser UA with the --user-agent switch, so you could have curl do the fetching part for you and see if that gets you past the headless download check.
RE: Beetscasts - managing podcasts for Tangara - kitinct - 2025-12-22
Thanks! I ended up pushing a patch that added 'BeetsCasts/0.1' as the user-agent in the actual fetch, which seemed to help some.
I'm not sure whether this should be a new topic so I'm just adding to this one, as the tool is basically about my podcasts setup anyway. I figure this might be of use to someone.
I ended up creating a systemd service that fetches all my podcasts at midnight, converts them and stages them in an sdcard directory on my machine. (service file here, see accompanying timer file also)
This worked fine as it went but it was kind of a pain logging into the machine to copy files on the terminal, so I also made a service file that copies the contents of the sdcard directory to my SD card when it gets mounted. It manipulates a file in an arbitrary directory as a rudimentary flag to protect against premature removal.
At some point I should probably explicitly set the mount for systemd to prevent errors if something exists at that mountpath but this seems functional for now.