Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

So I'm only about 15 years behind the curve here.

I want a piece of software which will run in the background on my Win7 machine and automatically download each week's episode of This American Life from this location after it airs, storing it on the hard drive of my desktop machine.

The software shall be free. It shall be lightweight. It need perform no other tasks but to grab the episode and park it on my hard drive.

Full_Tilt_Boogie

iTrader: (1)

This is relevant to my interests.

Enginerd

iTrader: (1)

I thought itunes does this?

Full_Tilt_Boogie

iTrader: (1)

^

triple88a

iTrader: (2)

It wont download it automatically but perhaps try Any Video Converter or ovget it?

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Anything which does not automatically download the file and drop it into my HD is functionally equivalent to nothing at all.

I don't need conversion, I don't need transoding, I really don't need anything at all aside from "Oh, there's a new episode. Let me download it and store it in this specific subdirectory on the E: drive of this local PC on which I am running."

triple88a

iTrader: (2)

Well "any video converter" has a download feature which is why i recomended it but yeah not automatically.

Full_Tilt_Boogie

iTrader: (1)

This may be a winner:

firenze - command-line podcast and news aggregator - Google Project Hosting

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

Perhaps you might achieve better results with "Recommend a podcatcher to me"? I clicked on this thread thinking you were a podcatcher in need of assistance. I had never heard the term before.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

It does indeed look promising. I shall try that out tonight.


I are rebelling against the grammer poleese.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

Since you're 15 years behind the curve, I don't feel bad about pasting a link to a 3 year old article.

Five Best Podcast Managers

y8s

iTrader: (8)

you can stream them on your phone

you can donate and get them all on a This American Life USB stick.

chriscar

iTrader: (24)

I've been listening to This American Life for years. Once a week is just about the right amount. I can't imagine bingeing on it from the beginning, I think I'd start talking like Ira Glass.

C

ReccomendationGuy

You might like to try The Spellcatcher.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Not sure if actual spammer, or someone with a sense of humor.


At any rate...


Great Scott!




So, as it turns out, I wasn't thinking about the problem fifth-dimensionally.

You see, I had this little MP3 player from Sansia, and I figured "ok, the purpose of this machine is to play MP3 files. So I'll set up an application on this other machines whose purpose is to be connected to the internet, and then I'll connect the two machines together once a week and manually transfer data between them, and..."

So you see where this is going?


Yeah. I just pulled an "I'm old and not hip to current-gen technology" move. As it turns out, I have this thing which is always attached to me at the hip. It claims to be a phone, but in reality it's a computer more powerful than what was on my desktop 15 years ago, and which is always magically connected to the internet without any wires, and, oh, it also has a headphone jack.


So I thought, "Hmmm... I wonder if some smart person put two and two together here, and created an app to run on this powerful computer which uses its magical network connection to automatically download podcasts to its local storage, present them to the user in an organized way, and play them through the headphone jack on demand?

As it turns out, the answer is "yes, quite a lot of them, in fact."

And the name of the app which I downloaded was called, quite creatively I thought, "Podcatcher."

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...dcatcher&hl=en


I'm really quite please with it, actually. It does exactly what I would want / expect it to, and nothing more.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

wait'll Joe finds out his phone can sync all his music via the cloud without using up any storage.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

He knows.

The problem is that "the cloud" is inaccessible when he's on a crowded train inside a hundred-year-old cast iron tube just beneath the bottom of the Hudson river under 97 feet of mud and water, which is when he most specifically wants to be able to listen to Radiolab and the TED Radio Hour. So caching to local storage is a must.

Fortunately my Galaxy S4 is no povertyphone, and has plenty of local storage.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

DC has service in the underground metro system...

Also, yes, the audio program apps usually have a caching feature.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Well, yes. You'd expect such amenities in a system where you spend more time stalled between terminals than actually moving.

Here in the city, the focus is more on getting the trains from point A to point B as quickly as possible. They do provide certain conveniences (light, oxygen), but not a lot of fluffy stuff.