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.

Development version:

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

Dircast is written in Python 3.

Windows dircast only works with 32bit python, due to python-magic dependent DLL files (there might be a 64bit version available from somewhere else). After pip install add these to PATH on you should be good to go.

Also pip install lxml dependency will fail if there isn't a wheel (.whl) matching your python version. Use the matching binary installer, e.g. lxml-3.6.0.win32-py3.4.exe, from lxml pypi page, then re-run pip install dircast.

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

---
title: All About Everything
description: A show about everything
url: http://www.mywebsite.com/everything-podcast/

The 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.

• mp3 (*.mp3)
• mp4 (*.aac, *.mp4, *.m4a)

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.

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.