How can I subscribe to an MP3 blog as if it was a podcast?

December 14, 2006 2:23 PM

I'm in search of an application that can subscribe to mp3 blogs via rss (or even better html scrape). Any suggestions?

I recently discovered the wonderful program Songbird. It's focused around finding new music from mp3 blogs and subscribing to them so that it [attempts to] downloads new tracks that are posted. I don't believe it relies on rss at all, just html scraping. The program is great in theory, but at this point its a bit immature and has some nasty bugs.

Now I'm hooked on the mp3 blogs for getting fresh music. Essentially what I'm looking for acts exactly like a podcast utility. So I tried some podcast syncing apps (like Juice and iTunes) and these don't do the job since an rss feed with mp3 links in the body is not the same as a rss podcast. So basically, I'm looking for a utility that will auto-download new posts from mp3 blogs that I subscribe too. Maybe I could mash together a few open source utils, or maybe a Python script will do the trick. Any suggestions before I go down the home-made road?

posted by unformatt to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I read this and have since got by using wget.
posted by pompomtom at 2:40 PM on December 14, 2006

maybe try scraping elbo.ws instead they aggregate a lot of mp3 blogs.
posted by skrike at 2:41 PM on December 14, 2006

I discovered Streampad today. I haven't entirely explored it yet, but it looks pretty cool so far and it may well do what you're wanting.
posted by SampleSize at 3:54 PM on December 14, 2006

You should really try "The Hype Machine". It condenses the content of zilleons of MP3 blogs into a searchable do-hickey, and you can make RSS feeds for iTunes out of any search you can come up with, or the most popular tunes. Great site.
posted by shanevsevil at 4:16 PM on December 14, 2006

Currently enjoying the playlist I got by searching "Christmas"...
posted by shanevsevil at 4:20 PM on December 14, 2006

Playr scrapes pages for MP3s; it can create playlists as podcasts (RSS with enclosed media links).

You can use Playr's RSS bookmarklet to get podcasted link to MP3 blog and then just subscribe to it with your podcasting application.

See, for example, a list of music blogs already in Playr's database.
posted by b. at 6:58 PM on December 14, 2006