Another version of dirCaster is released.
dirCaster is a php script that allows one to very easily start Podcasting mp3 files from their web host. This allows original content creators to easily provide a feed for iPodder, jPodder, etc.
This release fixes a bad bug that broke everything on filenames that contained things like a ‘&’ symbol.
More information here.
I like dircaster very much. I have made a simple “index.php” page that could go in the same directory and provides a neater link for podcast subscription, while presenting the list of mp3s with “traditional” hyperlinks so people can open or download them without having to have a podcast client. I needed this functionality for a podcast and audio gallery which will eventually appear on my school’s web site (I am a “High School” principal)
The index page relies heavily on your code (acknowledged, of course) as this was much quicker than writing my own to do the same job. Hope you don’t mind. Please let me know if there is a problem.
I have zipped this, with dircaster and some logos. The idea is for people to simply unzip into a new directory on their site, add some mp3s and browse to the directory. That works, but almost everyone will then need to adapt the page (and set variables in dircaster) to be more sensible for their site. The zip can be downloaded from my site - direct link is:
http://www.curtisfamily.org.uk/dircaster package.zip
Hi Dircaster solved part of my problem in trying to generate RSS with enclosures, when everything else failed me. Would you please be able to add the ASF audio and video filetypes? My community radio show is webcast in audio ASF and we’d like to Podcast without having to convert the ASF files into giant mp3 files. My camera generates video ASF, and I’d like to do video Podcasts.
Thank you for a wonderful program, its very hard to find ANY enclosure RSS feed generating software out there. The only other one I found was MT-Enclosures, and my webhosts don’t support the Perl 5.8 needed.
I’m just starting to use your dircaster script for our website (an webradio and audio-archive)… thx for your work, dircaster is just as great as simple!
I would like to use this script to auto generate my AAC and WMA feeds which I am now doing by hand. I tried to mess around with your code to enable this, but have not gotten anything to work. Is it possible to support these formats with dirCaster?
Thanks!
I’m trying to utilized your script and everything shows up in the ipodder but the mp3 file. I see the title of it, so it is being detected and it says downloading but than it’s 0k and the folder where it’s suppose to download unto my drive is empty too. any ideas? supposedly my server has php support and I know it is 4.0 at least.
help! I got so excited because your file made it so simple and I can’t get it to work properly
Mayka
I’ve been working on modifying the script so it will parse files in another directory. Why? I’m adding an upload feature where certain users can upload their mp3 files directly from a protected web page. In order to allow uploads to a folder I need to give it write permissions. When I do that most hosting companies won’t allow you to run a script from within a directory that is open to the world. That’s the why.
I’ve gotten so far as it will list the files and the link to the file shows up correctly but none of the ID3 tag information will. For the life of me I can’t figure out what changes I need to make to ensure it will be able to parse that info.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Post Nuke Podcaster
After receiving my beta spot for Odeo I began poking around and found out I could add my podcast. I did so and I realized how ugly my descriptions and titles were. I had been using Ryan King’s dirCaster as a means of doing my podcast. It̵…
Hey, just wanted to say that I really love this script and use it for both of my podcasts. It sure beats the heck out of having to edit my own XML file every week. One request, though - could you update this to support ID3v2 tags? Now that Apple has built podcast support into iTunes, providing as much information to them as possible in the RSS feed would be great. Keep up the good work!
Hi, i use your script, and it’s great, because it’s so simple. But here my two questions/featurerequests is it possible to count the hits or requests? And am i able to include images, so that they appear in iTunes?
One more try at posting. I have updated dirCaster to support .m4a, .asf and more. It also generates RSS feeds compatible with the iTunes site.
http://www.fwbf.info/code/dircaster_0_4b.zip
I am sooooo thankful for this script! I had a buddy who has been messing around with podcasting for the past few weeks - he just recently got it up and running. With this script I had it up in 5 minutes FLAT! I seriously googled “podcasting how to” and somehow ended up here - THANK YOU!
One problem that I am having is that when I add more than one MP3 file to the directory, iTunes stops recognizing the podcast…? Any suggestions? Maybe I am wrong in thinking that you should be able to set the variable to as many MP3’s as you want, right?
Anyway, for now I am troubleshooting - bur so far so good!
Hey-
Warren’s script is great, links in great with iTunes for AACs, etc.
On Mac OS X Server, I can’t get the php install program to work — has anyone had any luck?
The only shortcoming is that if a file has no ID3 tag info, the file name doesn’t show up in some RSS readers (like Safari…) — you only see blank fields, i.e. ” - - Read More”
Regardless, this stuff is sweet — nice to be able to get this up and running in minutes.
Mac OSX Server - the solution was to enable the Register Globals setting in /etc/php.ini to On. For any other problems if you email me your RSS feed I’ll troubleshoot it for you…
I updated dircaster slightly to allow a different audio directory. Why? so you can grant permissions to the audio files without worrying about someone touching other stuff. Left the link the same (shouldn’t have set it to a version specific link in the first place…) Oh and btw, yes you should be able to set it to any number of files to display…
Hmmmm… The following line would have to be changed to something like:$title - $mp3file->album - “.$artist.” n”);str_replace(?audioPath, “”,$filename) n”);$title - $mp3file->album - “.$artist.” n”);
from: echo (”
// if no ID3 title then strip the audio directory prefix and use the file name as the description
to: if ($title==”") {
echo (”
} else {
echo (”
}
that would substitute the filename for the lack of any ID3 tags…
That last comment had a backslash in front of the “n” removed when it posted. See here.. http://fwbf.info/code/no_id3_fix.htm
I am using this updated version of dircaster with itunes support. Everything appears to be working correctly with itunes, except, I have added an image I want to display in itunes in the description, however, itunes is not displaying the image.
someone in anothe forum was having a similar problem. they made a change to their xml code and then it worked. he said: “I found a sort-of solution: remove the.. section. The picture seems to be working now.”
not sure how to do this since dircaster generates the feed for me. anyone having problem with the image displaying? does anyone have a solution to this problem?
Hey Warren-
I tried your fix (with the backslash):
str_replace(?audioPath, “”,$filename) \n”);
echo ("
but I get a parse error. I know little about PHP, but I think the syntax’s right — where’s ?audioPath coming from…
Also, it seems to choke if a number sign is in the file name (though not in the id3 tag…)
For the latest iTunes compatible update and default title fix. http://www.fwbf.info/code/dircaster_0_4c.zip
Hey Warren-
The titles look very nice. Unfortunately, their links are all getting overridden by the $linkTAG. (In fact, every link seems to be). If you enter an empty linkTAG, you get no links anywhere…
I’m looking at this in Safari, by the way. iTunes doesn’t like it at all.
Check out:
http://24.6.72.72/test/npr.php
Johnny - bad link, can’t ping it. Please email me directly…
whoops, sorry, typo…
feed://24.5.72.62/test/npr.php
Here’s the top of the code. (I put in shadydentist.com as a test…)
$maxFeeds="10";
$sftypes="(.mp3 .m4b. m4a)";
$id3LibPath="./lib_getid3/getid3/getid3.php";
$audioPath = "../npr";
// RSS general tags
$titleTAG="johnny0 and the shuffle";
$descriptionTAG="random stuff from johnny0";
$linkTAG="http://shadydentist.com";
$copyrightTAG="";
$languageTAG="en-us";
$webMasterTAG="";
$generatorTAG="dirCasterv0.4c";
$ttlTAG="60";
$rssImageUrlTAG="";
$rssImageTitleTAG="Your image titles";
$rssImageLinkTAG="";
OK - I downloaded the latest files from WCS, and all is working well. I put my media files in the /audio folder as suggested and now my iTunes recognizes all the files instead of just one. You guys are amazing!
One other question - do you have to submit your feed to iTunes somehow to get into thier lists (thru the iTunes store)? or does it just propigate over time?
Everyone, 4c was broken when the audio folder was set to the current directory. It’s been fixed at http://www.fwbf.info/code/dircaster_0_4d.zip Please contact me with any other bugs you may find…
JohhnyO a few things. 1) get latest version. 2) audio file directory cannot be a peer of the dircaster directory, either inside the dircaster directory (”./”) or below {”./npr”}. and lastly no “&”, “< ", ">“, single quote or double quote characters in any ID3 tags. A hint, you can use Firefox to look at the actual XML output to troubleshoot. If Firefox reports badly formed XML then just look at the page source directly.
Alex, there is a button in the middle of the iTunes music store podcast section that’s titled “Publish a podcast”. click this, enter your feed and Apple will add your feed manually. Takes about 3 d-4 days.
Wow, Warren - thanks so much. I am learning web protocol daily and while I consider myself a “newb” to php, rss, xml, etc - I have never had such an easy time learning something as podcasting - thanks to your guy’s help! I WANT TO TELL THE WORLD! Ha ha!
Just a big THANK YOU!
And is there a discussion board for this - or is this the best place to post comments and questions?
Thanks again!
Hey Warren-
Thanks for the fixes. I realized that part of the problem is that Safari’s built-in RSS client doesn’t really display things well, and has some pretty bad caching problems that make it very hard to see changes. Things are looking good within iTunes though once I figured out the audio file directory limits.
I can see how quotes and other characters would hose the scripts. Any chance for parsing? I just did a quick search through iTunes, easily 10% of songs have single quotes in them. (That being said, they are showing up OK in iTunes…)
I already did that for the variable entries. I will look at going back in and scrubbing the ID3 tags also…
Completed the fix that handles all xml characters that require esc within xml code. Also cleaned up the config helper utilitity for the same items. http://www.fwbf.info/code/dircaster_0_4e.zip
Hey Warren-
Looks very good. I just want to thank you for all the mods you’ve made to the original script. It’s been very helpful to me.
When there are
- no ID3 tags and the file name is used as the title
- control characters in that file name
it was still choking in iTunes and Firefox. I added
$title = escChars (stripJunk($title));
to the item listing block, right below
if ($title == "") $title = str_replace("/","",strrchr($filename,"/"));
and it seems to have cleared up the problem. I can now use ampersands, quotes, and other sundry characters with wild abandon.
Thanks again,
johnny0
p.s. I’ve noticed that shadydentist hasn’t been updated for a while, and this comments page is admittedly hard to find — is there additional place where we can publicize this? Adam Curry?
That’s cool but I’d be VERY careful sticking strange characters into filenames… It will get around eventually. I posted it on www.macintouch.com (http://www.macintouch.com/itunes26.html#jul07) and it will eventually find it’s way around…
Hi
I am a newbie
installation worked fine. i uploaded 2 mp3 files.
feed://www.klangarchitekten.com/podcasts/dircaster.php works fine.
But: i cannot open the feed in i-tunes (advanced/open stream). what ist the link for the feed?
thx
Hi Anthony,
Great work!
I just started to use a bit modfied version of your script in order to build a phone to podcast service. The Voip Server Asterisk running on our site is recording the files, than they get converted to MP3 and Dircast makes the rest to deliver it to the user…
Very cool!
Thanks,
Thorsten
Blockhead
You send it http://www.klangarchitekten.com/podcasts/dircaster.php
(don’t start with feed://)
I am extremely interested in the idea of Podcasting, and I plan to use this script to aid me, except for one thing: I don’t really know how it works…
Now, I’m sure there’s a whole lot of tech behind it, and given more time I’d learn it all, but since I’m on a tight schedule, all I need to know is where to put this script and how to make it work. If anyone knows, I’d much appreciate being told…Thanks!
Open the Read Me file within the zip package. You do have to know how to FTP files and how to set access permissions if it’s a UNIX based server. Many FTP clients will let you set permissions also.
Hey Warren-
dircaster isn’t picking up the song tags from m4a / m4b files that I make from ChapterToolMe.
From the dircaster index file, I see that the files produced by ChapterToolMe appear as video/quicktime rather than audio/mp4 (even though they end with .m4a and .m4b). The weird thing is if I Get Info… on it, it looks just like any other .m4a or .m4b I have. (To add to the confusion, sometimes a couple of the tags do make it through.)
I hadn’t though of this before, but I guess aac files don’t have ID3 tags. Obviously the info is in there as it shows up in iTunes, but I’m wondering if the ID3 tag library is having trouble picking up the aac tags?
Anyway, wondering if anyone else has seen this. Is it the ID3 library not bothering to look because it thinks it’s video/quicktime? Or is ChapterToolMe spitting out aac tag info that the ID3 library can’t handle?
Thanks,
johnny0
dircaster assumes .m4a and .m4b files use quicktime tags. If the index.php file picks it up and dircaster does not then that is very strange since they both use the same algorithm. Do you have a “chapterized” file I could look at? email me a link or attach a small audio file.
johnnyO’s bug listed above is real. The bug is either in Apple’s chapter tool or the getID3 library. The library fails to decode some chapterized files but I cannot figure out why. The library author would need to address this.
I checked out PodcastAV — unlike ChatperToolMe, it seems to strip out the QuickTime tags entirely. However, unlike m4b podcasts generated by ChapterToolMe, when I edited in iTunes dircaster saw more tags. Only the title didn’t show.
That being said, both CTM and PodcastAV generate podcasts that dircaster can distribute to iTunes using the “Subscribe to Podcast” option under the “Advanced” menu, which is all I really care about.
For those who are interested, I am torn between ChapterToolMe and PodcastAV. I started with CTM, but I don’t like where the GUI is going. However, it seems faster than PodcastAV, and I can work more quickly in it. (Though the latter seems to be updated more regularly these days…)
I think the AAC / getID3 bug may be the one described here:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:3Zc0l_rJS4YJ:www.getid3.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php%3Ft%3D25%26sid%3D5bd19d9591976ca7f1f08e4b2c56fd82+getid3+known+bug+aac
(Sorry about the cached entry, the original is below, but their site seems to be down at the moment…)
http://www.getid3.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=25&sid=5bd19d9591976ca7f1f08e4b2c56fd82
Sure would be nice if Apple bundled dircaster with Mac OS X Server…
I’d love to be able to utilize a script like this to automate my process for delivering podcasts. However, I’m in a situation where I run my php scripts from one Web server while hosting my media files (.mp3, etc…) on a separate, NAS (network attached storage) server.
Would there be any way to get dirCaster to work in such a situation?
Is there an ASP or .Net based version of dircaster available? I am not allowed to install anything in my server and it has only IIS and .Net framework in it. Thanks in advance.
Hi, Warren,
I’ve tried to use the most recent version of dircaster (0.4e) but unfortunately unlike the previous 0.4, all I get is a blank page. Nothing is generated, and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Further, some above have posted a little of the custom tags that dircaster_config generated, and they look nothing like what I got. I got, well, basically what looks like trash. There’s nothing in the build that reminds me of what I had typed in at all. Please help, as I’d like to put my stuff up on iTunes, but right now most of the tags in 0.4 are ignored by iTunes.
is anyone having trouble with iTunes 6.0 on the Mac and dircaster? When iTunes checks a dircaster feed it crashes. iTunes literally just goes away — no error message, nothing. just gone…
I think I figured out the problem — if Apache on Mac OS X Server is caching, it freaks iTunes out. (If you see a port like 16080 number appended to URLs, then caching is on.) I turned it off and all was well with dircaster and iTunes.
[…] Dircaster seems to have taken on a life of its own and is up version 0.4e without my help. Awesome! I am going to see about releasing it into Sourceforge or something so it can be more easily be maintained by others. […]