So I have an iPod Shuffle, and I love it dearly. Compact, easy to use, holds a quantity of music I find useful, etc. Another thing I love a lot is WFMU, makers of the finest in online ecclectic radio. And, lo and behold, they have a fine selection of their shows archived—in mp3 format, no less! Perfect for sticking on my little iShuffle.
Well, almost perfect. The shows are quite long—3 hours in many cases. Often, I want to stop listening to a WFMU show in the middle and come back to it later, at the point where I left off. Now, famously, the iPod Shuffle has no GUI, and athough I usually don't care, this is one case where that's kind of annoying—shuttling around all these big 3-hour sound files is kinda inconvenient.
Fortunately, iTunes has this neat feature where, if you can convince it that a given file is a "podcast", it (and the iPod Shuffle) will remember where you were in the file the last time you listened to it. So I've written a little webapp that takes the WFMU RSS feeds (which aren't in the particular format that iTunes wants podcasts in) and translates them into something iTunes can handle.
Here's how it works: you go and look at the WFMU playlist page, and choose the show for which you want a podcast. They all have 2-letter abbreviations; for example, "This is the Modern World" (my current favourite on any radio station anywhere, yaaay DJ Trouble, you kick ass) is "LM". Her playlists are at http://wfmu.org/playlists/LM; the RSS feed is at http://wfmu.org/playlistfeed/LM.xml. You take that magic "LM" and plug it into my script URL, which is http://boywithmachine.net/wfmucast, like so:
http://boywithmachine.net/wfmucast?LM
Now try "subscribe to podcast" using that last URL under the Advanced menu in
iTunes—you should get a new entry in your "Podcasts" list with Trouble's
latest musical delights. Download and transfer to your iPod at your
convenience! And the best part is, it's totally reusable for other shows; for Diana's Kamikaze fun machine, just use
http://boywithmachine.net/wfmucast?DK; for Coffee Break for Heroes
& Villains, use http://boywithmachine.net/wfmucast?NU, and so
on.
Here's the code; it's done in Mason, and requires XML::Simple and LWP::Simple:
I'm always proud when I write some code that does something that's actually useful to me. I hope someone else finds this as useful as I do.