remcaster automates your MP3 downloading

Have you ever come across a web page (or have a web page bookmarked) that has a list of MP3 audio files, and thought to yourself, wouldn’t it be great if they’d put those MP3 files into an RSS 2.0 feed, aka podcast feed, so your iPodder podcast receiver can subscribe to that feed, and don’t have to manually go to that page to check for new MP3 files? Have an RSS feed automatically generated by a script that crawls a web page for MP3 files?

Nick Ciske has put together the answer to your (and my) prayers! Remcaster is a PHP script that can do just that! Now, granted, it’s a quickly put together script, so it doesn’t do caching, it crawls in real time, but gets the job done — until that MP3 audio publisher figures out how to do podcasting.

I’ve put in on my website at www.djchuang.com/scr/remcaster.php for your use, temporarily, until my monthly bandwidth gets eaten up.

You may download the remcaster script from Nick’s blog and install it on your website for your use. Nick rightly warns that this is bandwidth intensive; and rightly pleads for some other software developers to make the script more robust, and more bandwidth friendly.

To use remcaster, add the url as a query string parameter at the end of the php script name, e.g.
http://djchuang.com/scr/remcaster.php?url=http://domainofmp3s.com/webpage.htm

Here are a few remcast feeds I’m subscribed to [remcaster doesn't work with all web pages, I just found out]:

djchuang.com/scr/remcaster.php?url=http://www.liquid-acc.com/mt/archives/downloads/
djchuang.com/scr/remcaster.php?url=http://www.opensourcetheology.net/talks
http://www.djchuang.com/scr/remcaster.php?url=http://ebcla.org/sermons.asp

[update 11/09] Now there’s a free web service at mfeed.com that can do what remcaster tried to do!