douglas-watson/podcasts_export_app

Export Apple Podcasts for use on portable mp3 players

Podcasts Export App

Douglas Watson, 2022, MIT License

A macOS app that exports apple podcasts to a folder, for later use on a portable mp3 player.

Download here

Following the creation of my automator script, many people struggled to install or use it, due to python dependencies. This project is an attempt to help those people by distributing a proper app. If all goes well, it should install like any other macOS app.

Installing

Download the dmg. Open it, and drag the app to your Applications folder:

Since I am not a registered Apple developer, you will have to explicitely trust this app. When you first open the app, nothing happens as macOS blocks unregistered apps.

Go to System Prefences > Security & Privacy:

You should see a message warning that I am not a registered developer. Click Open Anyway:

You may need to confirm a second time:

Command Line Interface

If you're comfortable with command line interfaces then you can avoid overridding the macOS security checks described above while staying safe. Download the export.py file and use it like this: ./export.py output_directory. If you're still (rightly) concerned about running random code downloaded from the Internet then take a look at export.py: it is less than 100 lines long and its only dependency is pip3 install mutagen.

🎆 New features 🎆

Compared to the automator script, this app allows you to select which downloaded episodes to export. Helpful for large collections.

This one is launched like a regular app, it is no longer registered as a service available from Podcasts.

Developing

Create a virtual env or conda environment, and install requirements with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Building

Build a mac app with:

./build.sh

Before distributing, create a disk image with:

./build.sh dmg

podcasts_export_app's Issues

Download mp4 files?

Hi, ever since Apple Podcasts moved from the iTunes environment when all podcast files were saved in an accessabale directory which could be accessed via finder. But now the downloads are all stored in a segmented and user unreadable format. Podurama is the only app I have found so far where the files are stored in their native format, but unfortunately I am experiencing some delays in their feeds ampared to Apple Podcasts.

But finding your app suddenly excited me as it gives direc access to the Podacasts download folder contents.

My excitement quickly faded when I discovered this only exports mp3 files. My interest is to capture mp4 video files which several online shows are using more frequently.

What are the odds that you can enable mp4 files from Apple Podcasts app? This would be a lifesaver for me, as already shows I want to grab are already available in Podcasts app but have not yet appeared in Podurama which is the only app I found where I can see these original downloads in finder.

I'll definitely buy you next beer of 3 if you can make this happen.

• Justin

export.py does not work with py 3.7 or 3.10

When called with "% python3.10 export.py ./export/", get an error that "author" does not have the replace property.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/sth/Desktop/export.py", line 100, in
export(get_downloaded_episodes(), output_dir)
File "/Users/sth/Desktop/export.py", line 54, in export
safe_author = author.replace('/', '|').replace(':', ',')
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'replace'

MacOS 14 Sonoma
Mutagen version 1.4.7.0 installed using fink package manager.
i mutagen-py310 1.47.0-1 Module to handle audio metadata

Podcast list doesn't load

podcasts-export.txt

Launching the app using the instructions worked fine but no list of podcasts ever appears, even after hitting the refresh button a bit. I also tried the Python script, and installed the pip modules there, thinking that might help, but the script did not work, and the pip modules did not help. I am enclosing what might be relevant lines from the logs, though there are no outright errors or faults. I saw the one closed issue and also tried the solution there, even though it was not really relevant, but it also did not help. Running macOS 13.1 on an M1 processor.

Osstatus error 99999

Get's this error when opening. Running on Ventura 13.0

Feature Request: Podcast Length

I typically push the downloaded/exported podcasts to shokz MP3 player as file (for my 45min swimming), i have a lot of podcasts and cherry pick based on length (skip really short and really long one)

it would be great to have one more column to show length of the podcast specifically adding MP3.info.length would be very useful