Tag Archives: mp3

RSS feed from a directory full of MP3s

I use BeyondPod to listen to a lot of Podcasts, but I also have a bunch of audiobooks I have converted from CD to MP3s. I could manually upload them to a directory on my phone, but who has the patience for that?

First step: Fix the tags in your MP3s. I use easyTAG. I can change the filenames based on clean tags. Well formated filenames are very important when automating the RSS feed creation. You want your audiobooks to be in perfect order every time. I have settled for this mask:

%b-%n-%t-%a

Second step: Get fapg! This little tool creates the rss feed we later need.

Third step: Make a directory on your apache server, where you will either place the MP3s or symlinks to the files. I have chosen to call the directory “audiobooks”. Clever!

Fourth step: If you want security, you can use apache to do it for you.

<directory "/var/www/audiobooks">
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Audiobooks"
AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/httpd-passwords
require user yourusername
</directory>

Fifth step: Run fapg in the audiobooks directory.

fapg -f rss -n -o ./rss -p "http://yourdomain.org/audiobooks/" *

The “-f rss -o ./rss” makes it create a file called rss in the directory. “-p” adds your domain to the filename because not all Podcatchers understand that your MP3s are in the same directory as the feed file.

Now you have a working feed in that directory. Rerun fapg after adding new or removing old MP3s.