Since I stopped working on Beer Style Guidelines, I have been looking for something to work on.

I’ve tinkered with a few things here and there. Nothing really stuck until recently. I just finished a small project. I wrote a small app to download podcast episodes.

I have two music (electronic mixes) podcasts that I listen to. I’ve been listening to these podcasts for over 10 years. I decided that I wanted to download all of the podcasts and import them into the Music app.

I initially looked for apps where I could download all available episodes of a podcast and couldn’t find anything I liked. So, I did what most nerds do, I wrote my own.

The podcast downloader that I wrote is written in Swift. It’s a Swift Package that I run via a command-line interface.

I got to play with a few new libraries. I used FeedKit to parse the RSS feed. I used ID3TagEditor to edit ID3 tags on the downloaded MP3 files.  Finally, I used ConsoleKit to log messages and loading progress to the terminal. It was fun to play with some different libraries in different domain spaces.

For a minute, I thought about open-sourcing the project. But I think it could be used indiscriminately. I wouldn’t want anyone wasting bandwidth downloading all podcasts. I was a bit nervous about doing this myself. I decided to send recurring donations to the podcast authors. Prior to performing a full download, I had done a lot of one-episode testing. I also ensured that if the process failed somewhere, episodes wouldn’t be downloaded again.

The entire project took me about two weeks of tinkering. It’s probably not the best-written code I’ve produced, but I’m happy with the outcome.

I now have all of these music podcast episodes that I’ve enjoyed over the years in Apple Music. I can listen to them again whenever I want.

I’m happy that I was able to work on a new project. I even finished it. Even though this project will likely never be released anywhere.

I’m not sure what I’ll work on next, but I am really happy with how this one turned out.