Roll your own podcast downloader?

Linux Discussion Applications
1

I enjoy podcasts, but sometimes I find interviews or talks on YouTube, that aren’t findable on AntennaPod. I would love to download the audio off the YouTube link, then put it…somewhere…and then point AntennaPod to this file/server. I don’t know what kind of software would be needed to do that. I like listening on AntennaPod because I can listen to it at a faster rate without the audio distorting. I’ve tried it on NewPipe and VLC but everyone starts sounding high pitched.

2

I haven’t used it but podboat is made to auto-download podcasts including youtube.

3

Well, I read through this and didn’t fully understand how I could get what I needed. But I saw you could download it, so I was looking how to import it.

In AntennaPod, you can ‘import local folder’ which I’ve never seen before. So I just downloaded the audio of a podcast on YouTube, saved it to a Podcasts folder, added that, and it plays perfectly. Boy, wish I knew that a while ago…

So thanks, you did help me solve it!

4

VLC has an option to preserve pitch when playing back at faster than real time. It’s called “time-stretching audio” in the advanced settings on Android.

I use an app from F-droid called “dvd” that’s a GUI for youtube-dl. Works exactly the same as the command line programming on desktop.

Sometimes I’ll just put a YouTube URL into VLC and select the “audio only” option. So I can listen straight from YT and turn my screen off at the same time.

5

Yeah. 1.6x to 1.8x listener here. I figure that if I ever meet any of the content creators from DLN face to face, they better be huffing helium or I won’t recognize their voices.

4 Likes
6

FYI youtube auto only from the command line:

youtube-dl -x https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q4haMhvqCs
1 Like
7

Mark reminded me…, youtube-dl can archive a youtube channel though I think it’s an abandoned project so you’d want to use it’s broadly accepted replacement yt-dlp. (should be in your repo)

Here’s an example of using yt-dlp to archive the tuxdigital channel of all videos uploaded after 2022-04-01 as audio.

It can be run repeatedly to pull in anything new and will stop checking as soon as it runs into something it’s already downloaded or that’s over the date line:

yt-dlp \
	--dateafter 20220401 \
	--paths "$HOME/Downloads/TuxDigital" \
	--download-archive "$HOME/Downloads/TuxDigital/downloaded.txt" \
	--extract-audio \
	--audio-format best \
	--no-post-overwrites \
	--break-on-existing \
	--break-on-reject \
	https://www.youtube.com/c/TuxDigital/videos
1 Like
8

There are a few podcasts I listen to at normal speed, and then it’ll switch to DLN, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why they’re talking in slow motion.

2 Likes
9

Have any of you used ytfzf? Its a command line YT viewer, it doesnt display YT descriptions, but otherwise plays YT videos in MPV. It makes YT fun again. It works great in Arch, didnt work in Ubuntu…

10

uses youtube-dl. Easy to use.

1 Like
11

I use aytdl to download the latest Linux Saloon and another live stream that I listen to. You have to fiddle with the max duration counter in the config file to make sure it doesn’t fail because it doesn’t think you are downloading music. It works pretty well.

When I need the audio from a live stream I don’t have set up in aytdl I use youtube-dl with

youtube-dl -i --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMwcNgIPjpo

That gets you mp3, obviously. You can choose another type.

I have a folder on my media phone for “Random Podcasts” where I transfer these files. Podcast Addict is subscribed to the local folder and it updates the playlist.

1 Like