Podcast Backup Script

Now that John Chidgey announced that he is terminating his fabulous Pragmatic podcast and that the site will disappear eventually I thought it might be a good idea to make a backup copy of the episodes outside of my ordinary podcast clients. A quick Google search for this did not bring up a solution.

So, this morning I hacked together a fairly simple, quick and dirty script in Python to download all episodes from a specific podcast. You can find it on GitHub. Just pass the URL to the podcast’s feed and run it. In John’s case, for example:

./pypodbackup.py http://techdistortion.com/podcasts/pragmatic/feed

It will then download all episodes directly into the script’s directory.

Alternatively, if you don’t pass in a feed, the script looks for a file named podcasts.txt and takes multiple feeds from there, line by line, and downloads the episodes.

The script does not download files it has downloaded earlier. This applies to files that still reside inside the script’s directory. This allows for checks on a regular basis.

Disclaimer: I’m not a Python programmer, so there might be a million different ways to do this better. I did not add any security checks whatsoever. If you want to improve this script feel free to do so. Don’t forget to create a PR.