Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry is my podcatcher, castget(1). I've used several CLI podcatchers over the years, changing mostly because hpodder (my then-favorite) became deprecated and dropped out of repos, so I had to find a replacement.

Configuration is a simple INI-style file, it allows me to post-process files (certain ones I cut off the 7-minutes of advertising at the beginning, customize ID3/ID3v2 tags), and give them a naming-convention that works for how I listen.

It runs nightly from cron(8) downloading to my queue directory-tree, emailing me the resulting output, and saves its state in files that can be fairly easily tracked in version-control (annoyingly it doesn't sort them, so every run mangles them, but a little processing with vim makes quick work of them, meaning the resulting diff output is just the new podcasts and a top-level timestamp change, not a complete remunging of the file). About every 3–4GB of queued-up files, I've usually reached the ones on my player/phone, delete those, and replace them with the fresh queue. It does mean that news podcasts are largely worthless because there could be a 3–4wk lag between when the episode releases and I eventually catch it in my player.

It's simple, it works, and it plays well with the rest of my ecosystem. I like it.