ozzmosis.com

Back in August 2007 podcast pioneer Dave Slusher requested a method to take an Apple iTunes Music Store (ITMS) podcast link and translate it to return the standard XML feed of a podcast. It didn't take long for me to write a quick and dirty Python program to do the work, but some time late last year Apple changed the file formats returned by the ITMS servers which broke my code.

This morning I rewrote it. You can download it from here.

The basic usage is:

./itunes-url-decoder.py url

Where url is the ITMS podcast link.

For example, the ITMS podcast link to the series of Triple M Get This podcasts is:

./itunes-url-decoder.py "http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330582773"

As of writing, this returns the following feed URL:

http://www.getthis.net.au/getthis.xml

You can then paste that URL in any podcatching software - no need to use iTunes!

To run itunes-url-decoder.py you will need Python 2.6 (or newer) installed, or a version of Python that provides the plistlib library.

category: /tech