New project PodCaster

A while back, I created to perl scripts that were used to record internet radio streams to files and place them in a podcast. This was maily because I like to listen to the nighttime shows in the day while I'm at work. Were not allowed to stream stuff over the work network because it places to much of a load on the network. So I came up with a better solution of recording them and putting them on my iPod.

This worked great for quite a while, but their were always some short comings in my scripts. I'm also mainly a Java/C++ coder, so the perl scritps are quite hacky. Then a while back, the scripts stopped working, I think this my badly written perl.

So I decided to recreate them in Java and started a new project called PodCaster, which can be found here. The idea is that it will replace the perl stuff I did before, but be cleaner and maintainable. Its progressed very well and quite a few new features have been added which the perl scripts could never do. Like for example encoding meta data into the recored audio files, adding cover art to the feed and been able to record the shows in different formats.

The Java PodCaster project still relies on some tools like mplayer and ffmpeg, but I might look to replacing them at some point with pure java code. The good news is that this is now nearing the first release (0.1). I expect I'll make the release official in the next couple of days.