MP3::PodcastFetch and fetch_pods.pl Author: Lincoln D. Stein First Release Date: January 1, 2007 Description ----------- Fetch_pods.pl is a Perl script to fetch and maintain a directory of podcast subscriptions. Information about which podcasts to fetch are stored in a configuration file. You control how many podcast files to keep, where to keep them, whether to rationalize their ID3 tags, and whether to delete older files. This script will also create playlists for recently-fetched podcasts. MP3::PodcastFetch is a set of Perl modules used for the backend of this script. You can use this library to write your own Podcast maintenance system. Installation ------------ To install, you will need Perl version 5.8 or higher and recent versions of the following additional modules, all of which can be found on CPAN (www.cpan.org): LWP Date::Parse HTML::Parser Config::IniFiles In addition, if you wish to update the ID3 tags in downloaded podcasts, you will need one or more of the following ID3-writing libraries (also on CPAN): Audio::TagLib (from CPAN, also requires taglib from http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html) MP3::Tag (from CPAN) MP3::Info (from CPAN) Audio::TagLib is the most capable of the libraries, and is able to write tags through ID3 version 2.4. ID3::Tag can write tags through ID3 version 2.3, while MP3::Info can only write version 1 tags. Audio::TagLib is a bit more trouble to install because it requires the taglib C++ library to be installed first, but I recommend using it, if you can. If you do not have any of these libraries installed, then you will still be able to download podcasts, but you will not be able to normalize their ID3 tags. Now run the following commands from the top level of this distribution: % perl Build.PL % ./Build % ./Build test % ./Build install You may need to perform the last step as the superuser. Run "perldoc Module::Build" for information on how to odify the build and install process, such as how to specify a non-standard installation location. The build process will install the command fetch_pods.pl somewhere on your executable path. Please run the command "perldoc fetch_pods.pl" to learn about how to configure and run the fetch_pods.pl script. Use "perldoc MP3::PodcastFetch" to learn more about the underlying Perl library.