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Sometimes I have some random non-music audio files I want to listen to on my phone. There are loads of ways to accomplish this of course–on the iPhone I’ve used nPlayer and VLC, and copying files over to my phone from my computer, or just downloading and saving them on my phone, is pretty easy.
But I don’t like having multiple apps for the same general kind of content: I tend to listen to audiobooks in Apple Books or Libby, and podcasts in a podcast app, and on top of that I use the Great Courses app and adding another app just for audio (mostly spoken content and old radio shows) is annoying.
So instead I wanted to create a custom podcast feed so I could listen to stuff like the old Chris Morris Blue Jam radio show in my podcast app.
There have been various “Turn a Dropbox folder into a podcast feed” things before but I wanted something that didn’t require any third-party service. So, thanks to the magic of AI, here is a little Python script that creates an RSS feed of audio files in a folder, then creates a temporary web server for it. You then add the local URL (IP address/feed.xml) of the feed into your podcast app, download all the files you want, and then shut down the server. (If you do this later with different files they will be added to the same “show” in your app, at least with Apple Podcasts–you don’t need to keep the files in some folder after they’re on your phone. Nor, if you are serving the feed from the same local IP address, do you need to re-add the show each time.) The files will be in alphabetical (ASCII-betical) order in the feed, and the modification date of the file is updated to match that order. You can have custom artwork, title, etc.
It is called Podcasterator. Download it over here, or click “files” above. There is a readme with more details, but to make use of this you need to be familiar with the terminal, have Python3 installed, and so on.
I have only tested this with Apple Podcasts, which I use because it, after many years, is finally “good enough,” and this being Apple, integrates well with the Apple Watch. Sorry Marco! I still have an Overcast hat. (To be fair, Overcast lets you sideload files directly, which gets you the same thing.)
I have used this on macOS and Windows, but can’t get it to work from within Windows Subsystem for Linux due to network translation issues or some such. But there is no need to. It probably works on regular (not in a VM) Linux just fine.