Music blog download tool?

February 13, 2006 2:23 PM

Music blog download tool?

I have a dream application: you give it RSS feeds to mp3 blogs, and it downloads the music to a well-organized target folder. Does such a thing exist? I found Jeffery Veen's wget command, but I'm wondering if there's something with a GUI out there. Mac or Windows, doesn't matter.

posted by symbebekos to technology (15 comments total)

I've been looking for exactly the same thing. As a temporary solution, you could use a bulk downloader like the Firefox Flashgot extension to grab all of the .mp3 links on a page as you're reading it, but an automated solution like the one you're looking for would clearly be superior.

Possibly relevant digresssion: I had actually started working on a script that would take an mp3 blog's full-content RSS or Atom feed and scrape it for .mp3 links, then output a feed with each song as an enclosure element (or the Atom equivalent). The idea was that I could then use the podcast support in iTunes to take care of the downloading for me, and I wouldn't have to rely on a separate application for consuming MP3 blogs. This didn't work, however, because iTunes only downloads one enclosure per entry. This strikes me as stupid, but iTunes is actually working as designed in this case, because RSS 2.0 only allows one enclosure per entry. I attribute this to the shortsighted design that is typical of RSS 2.0 -- the only use case for enclosures that occurred to the designers of the enclosure element was podcasting, where each entry corresponds to a single podcast "show." MP3 blogging, or any other use case which might require more than one enclosure per feed, apparently didn't occur to Winer, et al. Multiple enclosures in Atom (using the link element) are perfectly valid, but iTunes unfortunately still only downloads one enclosure per feed entry even when consuming Atom feeds.
posted by cobra libre at 2:52 PM on February 13, 2006

Similar to Flasgot, there's DownThemAll. Not exactly what you're looking for, but I've used it to great success.
posted by FlamingBore at 3:00 PM on February 13, 2006

The new SongBird application, currently in bug-ridden alpha, seems to do what you are asking. It is a good idea, but the current version crashes alot.
posted by rabbitsnake at 3:54 PM on February 13, 2006

If you can have a publicly-accessible RSS aggregator website that can retrieve full posts, you can pass it to WebJay's Import page, which will scrape it for MP3s. Then run DownThemAll off that page to grab all the MP3s in one go.

I used to do this with Kinja.com but now it only displays post summaries and file links are usually at the end of posts.
posted by junesix at 4:18 PM on February 13, 2006

You could also, it seems, just load each of your favourite MP3 blogs into WebJay, and subscribe to its RSS feeds as podcasts.
posted by Robot Johnny at 4:42 PM on February 13, 2006

iTunes works for me. Just subscribe to the RSS feed as a podcast. I do it for Hype Machine.
posted by Mo Nickels at 5:29 PM on February 13, 2006

PS: for Mac OS X Cast Away solves the problem with iTunes being set up where it assumes don't want to keep hundreds of files for any podcast.
posted by Mo Nickels at 5:34 PM on February 13, 2006

Heh. I've tried to do this a couple times, including once running an elaborate wget string. The answer: Write it yourself.

I don't mean that in a dickish way, though I've certainly been rudely rebuffed when looking for this sort of thing. One of the problems is that you'd be adding to server traffic without seeing the ads, and another is that the web content is what makes mp3blogs dubiously fair use. I think those two issues are why a lot of open source people won't touch the job, and several others who I've talked with simply have no interest in GUIs. For them, a wget string IS the elegant solution (aka: The Linux Problem).

This all actually led me to want to create a website where open source software could be commissioned by small group donations. I'd pay two or three dollars toward this, and I'd imagine that a bunch of other people would too.
posted by klangklangston at 10:04 PM on February 13, 2006

The debate about whether it's fair use is irrelevant when the band itself (i.e. the copyright holder) is the entity that is posting the tracks.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:03 PM on February 13, 2006

You're warned that some mp3blogs are opposed to practices like this, and if a particular program like this gets too much traction, it's quite possible that many mp3blogs will block it, server-side. Which shouldn't stop you, but something for developers to consider.
posted by Marquis at 1:16 AM on February 14, 2006

klangklangston: dubiously is right - posting copyright tracks and making money from ads isn't fair use. I hear what you're saying about wget - I can handle it, but I want an app to give to my less tech friends.

I totally value what music bloggers have to say about the tracks, and I wonder if this theoretical app couldn't scrape their comments and stick them in the id3 tag of the mp3.
posted by symbebekos at 8:14 AM on February 14, 2006

Hey, that'd be gorgeous. I'd love a program that did that. Make sure it runs on 10.2.8, OK?

(And the "dubious" referred to the claims of fair use stemming from the "commentary" associated with the files).
posted by klangklangston at 8:31 AM on February 14, 2006

I spun my version of veen's wget into this Applescript Studio app. It's very 'unfinished,' but it works on my powerbook. No idea if it will work for anyone else or not. Let me know if it does, and maybe I'll improve it a bit. Email in profile.
posted by adamkempa at 11:00 AM on February 14, 2006

Update: I'm told it works, but you need to have wget installed first. You can get it here. Looking into a way of including it.
posted by adamkempa at 6:41 AM on February 15, 2006

Anyone using Firefox and iTunes on OS X might want to try FoxiPod. It's comprised of a Greasemonkey script and an OS X app; the Greasemonkey script adds special FoxiPod links to any page with .mp3 links that, when clicked, hand off control to an app that downloads the mp3 and adds it to your iTunes library. It works remarkably well if you want to grab songs selectively while you're browsing rather than use a bulk downloader.
posted by cobra libre at 9:03 PM on February 27, 2006