Pronounced derp-odd.

dirpod is a command-line utility, written in Python, which allows one to generate a podcast based upon two things: a directory full of mp3s, and a JSON file which stores some necessary pieces of the podcast metadata.

TBD -- should include pip instructions, as well as git clone

In order to run, you need to define the path in which both the mp3s and the channel.json file stay. These should all be in the same directory (and not in subdirectories). Run it like so:

dirpod /home/user1/dirwithmp3s

This will generate the RSS file, which will be output into that same dirwithmp3s.

The channel.json file is the only place to specify configuration information, some of which is mandatory. See samples/channel.json for a fully documented example of the config.

NOTE: The data within the ID3 tags will override the values defined in the channel.json file. The ID3 mapping for the RSS items would be:

title => title
artist => author
album art => image (only the image for the single episode)
genre => category (in addition to categories specified in channel.json)

It is required to at least specify a few values in the channel.json. They are the following:

"title": "Your Podcast Title",
"subtitle": "A few short words about this podcast."
"author": "Firstname Lastname",
"description": "This podcast is about foos and bars, and more!"

As long as those properties are specified, the podcast will generate correctly. There are of course some other config values which are highly recommended, especially if you plan on trying to find new listeners via iTunes' search functionality, etc.

By default, the utility will assume that all links are relative. For example, the enclosure elements will simply specify some_episode.mp3 as the URL, instead of http://mydomain.com/podcast/some_episode.mp3.

In order to define a static root for the enclosures, just set the enclosures_url property in the channel.json. If set like:

"enclosures_url": "http://myotherdomain.com/podcast/",

Your podcast feed will add myotherdomain.com as the base for the enclosures. This is useful if you plan on hosting the files on a CDN, or if you use FeedBurner (or similar) for the RSS, which may impact the relative links.