just an overview, podcasts are basically audio fed over RSS feeds, so you can have radio like shows streamed to you to listen to at your leisure.

see www.ipodder.org for more.

I've seen one user who wanted link his podcast downloads into foobar automatically, but surely, it would be possibly to implement a plugin as part of foobar that would do this? Scan the RSS feeds, download the track, and place it in a directory, and set up playlists. I'm unfortunately really poor at code, and would make a mess of anything i put my hand to.

foobar attracted me because the plugin community seemed to be cutting edge (as far as media players go) and I think this would be a useful addition to the fine collection of plugins available.

That seems like a feature/plugin request to me.

Moved to General forum.

What I've been doing so far is using Doppler (I use the RC, I'm a beta whore) to download from the feeds, and use it's option to use an external player (defaults are WMP and iTunes) and point it at foobar. Then, when a file from a feed is downloaded, it will open it with foobar. Until/If ever there is an option in foobar for this, at least this might help a little bit.

Happy podcasting.

UP ! I'm really interested too...

So am I, a cleaner way to play podcasts within Foobar would greatly appreciated!

Not exactly cleaner but I use foosion's podcast parser with the following copy command.



Then just paste into a dos prompt (Assuming you have wget.exe in your path.)

Obviously this doesn't replace your regular podcasting client but I find it useful for feeds I want to preview on the server before deciding to download.

i wouldn't mind working on something like this. i know enough about rss/xml and i know how podcasting works, but i know very little about programming outside of simple php/javascript stuff. what should i look into to learn how to program foobar2000 plugins? thanx.

First you'll need to learn C++ to implement a foobar2000 component. Then some knowledge on the Win32 API would be good, especially if your component will need a GUI. Finally, you'll need to learn a few things about the foobar2000 SDK.

If you search the dev forum, you should find a few threads about getting started with C++ and Win32. There is also a sticky with a tutorial that covers the basics of the foobar2000 SDK.

Hello,

I would like to add a vote to have a new podcast plugin in fb2k. I'm using foobar for about 2 years now, but i had to dwl itunes to listen to podcast .

Nothing would more please me than to uninstall iTunes from my pc. I guess I'll have to wait until fb2k provide a powerful podcast management (and chapters support for m4a files).

Besides the fact that I never really understood the purpose of podcasts (whats the difference to normal internet radio or just simply downloading an audio file?) I want to mention that there already is chapter support for mp4/m4a/whatever files in foobar2000.

Regards,
The Link

Internet radio streams whereas dl-ing a file keeps it on your hard drive. As for the specific difference between podcasting and simply dl-ing an audio file someone has posted on their site is that podcasting integrates an RSS feed. Basically I see podcasting as the "Tivo" of web audio blogs.

Would you care to elaborate on how Foobar2000 handles chapter support? I've tried dragging ".m4b" files into Foobar2000, and I get an error message that the file cannot be read. Can you chapter a ".m4a" file?

Thanks!

How did you obtain that file? Could it be that there's some DRM on that file? Foobar2000 cannot read files with DRM.

I ripped a 43 minutes interview from a CD to AAC (m4a) using Foobar2000's diskwriter, then manually changed it to .m4b. The file plays fine as a "m4a", but not as a "m4b". I use Foobar2000 v 0.8.3, so could that be the problem?

.m4a and .m4b are the same format as .mp4. It's just that Apple chose to use a different file extension in different cases.

Hi Foosion,

Is there a reason why then, if they are the same, that foobar2000 v 0.8.3 doesn't recognize the m4b extension?

Bump for a podcast support in foobar

I support that bump..only reason why i still have iTunes on my HD!

Nice podcast support would be nice

Just wanted to put in my vote for a podcast component. Is anybody considering doing this?

I put in a vote for a generic XML downloading/parsing plugin that could pass information to other plugins, or just send the data to global tagz.

I've been thinking about this a bit recently and might put the effort into learning some C++ to see if I can code it together. It would allow a lot of possiblities for displaying meta-data for playing files (eg, lyrics, wikipedia biographics, last.fm charts etc) and could work as the backend for a podcasting plugin. Basically I picture a plugin that can handle any XML data, and obviously anything that can be turned into XML by a web script could then be used in foobar.

When I started writing this post it seemed very appropriate, now I realise I'm veering off topic

This would be an excellent component (or built into Foobar) that would help bring iTunes users over to Foobar (like me).

Yeah, the regular updating/episodic format of podcasts (like the Lost podcast) is really good, I wish foobar had something of the sort.

The question is.... has anything like this been developed within the last 10 months since your post?

Foobar really needs podcast support. I mean, its kind of retarded NOT to have it. Podcasting is really popular and very useful. Also, Foobar should have better internet radio support.

It's not terribly hard to implement podcast support in Foobar.

What you need:
foo_autoplaylist
Juice (or some other app to download the podcasts)

Use Juice or whatever other app you like to download your podcasts and have it drop them all into the folder of your choosing. Add that folder to Foobar's library. Then, make a Podcast playlist. Go into the Autoplaylist options and give it a very simple query (%genre% HAS podcast). Once that's added, you're good to go: download your podcasts, have Foobar rescan that folder, and new podcasts show up in your autoplaylist. If you then want to put them on your iPod, use foo_dop and sync it up. Make sure you select your autoplaylist and it'll send the files right over.

No iTunes necessary, nor any need to clutter up Foobar with RSS support.

btw; if somebody is up to actually implement that, dont forget that there is tons of video casts out there as well, so if you get some of these thinking is audio only, there should be a warning that mp4 contains video tracks as well.

but does ipod recognize the files as "podcast files"? I once sent the podcast file manually, but it doesn't appear under the podcast category, and would not be set as 'resume' automatically, though the genre is podcast.

Not currently. Perhaps in the future foo_dop will add that capability though.

I am still trying to find a way of having podcasts in foobar in an all in one way.
i run foobar on a portable usb hark disk, so i can use it on school computers. I understand using juiced with foobar, but there is not a portable version on juice - so im stuck. is there no foobar podcast componant yet (that downloads)

thanks