Dircast is a tool to create a podcast RSS feed for a directory of audio files.

Dircast is inspired by other projects that do the same thing (especially dropcaster) but dircast supports file formats other than mp3.

Install from github:

pip install https://github.com/calpaterson/dircast/archive/master.zip

Dircast is written in Python 3.

First create a channel.yml file in the same directory as your audio files:

---
title: All About Everything
description: A show about everything
base_url: http://www.mywebsite.com/everything-podcast/
# image_url is optional
image_url: http://www.mywebsite.com/everything-podcast/folder.jpg

The base_url part should be where you will host your podcast.

Then (in the same directory) use it like this:

dircast . index.rss

Dircast will automatically look for audio files and add them to the RSS feed. It will use any tags present in the audio files to set file metadata. Files will be added in order of last modification time ("mtime").

• mp3 (*.mp3)
• mp4 (*.aac, *.mp4, *.m4a)
• anything else that mutagen supports
  • that's a long list

Dircast will look for a title tag to determine the title of your files. If it doesn't find one it will use the filename as the title.

Whichever is chosen the title's SHA1 checksum will be the "unique id" of that podcast entry. If you change the title tag (or, if you didn't have a title tag, if you rename the file) the unique id will change and podcast software might get confused.

Dircast adds files in order of last modification time. If your files all have the same "mtime", but you want them ordered alphabetically, try running a command like:

ls | sort | xargs -d '\n' -I % sh -c '{ echo "%"; touch "%"; sleep 1; }'

Note that you need a one second minimum gap between podcast entries because datetimes in RSS feeds have 1-second resolution.

Make sure that the HTTP server you are serving from supports range requests - otherwise most podcast software will not be able to seek through the audio. Most proper webservers like nginx or apache will do this but simple ones (like the one in the Python standard library) won't.

Dircast is licensed under GPLv3. See the file LICENCE for details.