A couple months ago I worked with a podcaster who wanted to take out baked-in ads from 200 episodes and move them to a new media host where we could do dynamic insertion.
They didn’t keep their original files or sessions, so I had to find a way to get a hold the mp3s from his RSS feed.
The fastest way I could find was to get them from ListenNotes.com – one at a time!
As you can imagine, the entire process took hours. 🕰️
There must be a better way, right?
There IS a better way. Actually, quite a few!
Thanks to members of the Podcast Editor Academy and Podcast Editors Club for sharing these awesome solutions.
Some are apps you can download and run on your computer or are programs that run in a command line.
Take your pick!
Disclaimer: I have not tried all of these solutions, so please do your due-diligence when choosing to download any of the following resources.
Free solution for Windows, Mac, Linux, and NAS
JDownloader is a free, open-source app that works on all the big operating systems.
You can pause downloads, set bandwidth limits, and auto-extract archives.
Get the app, for free, at https://jdownloader.org/download/index
Thanks to Riley Byrne and Engin Hassan for submitting this suggestion! It worked well!
Free developer GitHub solutions
Chad Parizman suggested podcast-dl by lightpohl (click here for the resource)
Martin Brown says podcast-archiver by janw is simple to use with some command lines
An intuitive app, according to Sokol, is gpodder. I like that name! (download from here)
Mac & IOS Apps
Nathaniel Senff suggested SiteSucker from the Mac App store (currently $4.99 USD)
Kam Lal from Notetracks.com and Shawn Thorpe from Blubry suggested Podcast Archiver (currently $5.99 USD)
Web app
Mathew Passy, creator of Podcast Beacons and Conntap, created DownloadMyPodcast.com
The app will either provide a free CSV file, which includes links to any/all episode files from a single podcast (via RSS), or purchase credits to download mp3 files in bulk (very handy!)
Should Editors keep their client’s mp3s?
If you are like me, you don’t bother to keep the final mp3. I mean, there’s a copy stored by the media host…so why bother?
However, as a best practice I have learned to keep copies of the original session file – or at the very least the edited segments.
- The client I mentioned at the beginning of this post wanted to remove baked-in ads from 200 episodes, but didn’t keep copies himself
- Another client of mine needed to provide finalized versions of his episodes for their Compliance department
- If local or cloud storage fails, grabbing a copy could come in handy if wanting to run a replay
Whatever the reason, at least we know now that there are solutions for us to get copies.
I hope this helps you!
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