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I was recently given a free one year trial to a premium podcast feed which specialised in getting you to sleep. It features bedtime stories for adults and children, reads royalty-free literature, and also provides eight-hour mixes of ambient music, including ASMR rain, gentle piano playing, coffee shop background noise, binaural sounds, and so on.
While being read to doesn’t help me get to sleep, and nor does ambient music actually, I do like listening to various long looped sounds to help me focus during the day and help me unwind at nights. So, as I poked around the podcast feed, liking what I was hearing, I had an idea of archiving these eight-hour mixes to continue listening after the trial has ended, and I’ll go into detail how in this short post.
Downloading
First thing was to download the “episodes” from the podcast feed. A quick web search pointed me in the direction of podcast-dl, a command line method which promised to download in bulk, in .mp3, and with the title in the file name for easy identification.
It was surprisingly simple, having already installed node.js, all I needed to do was install podcast-dl in Terminal with my initial command of listing the RSS feed and where to download the files to, go through a couple of prompts, and then run it again: sudo npx podcast-dl --url https://example.com/RSS --out-dir /path/to/directory
Playing
Next, I would want to play these files, and have them while at my desktop working and on my phone while I unwind at night. I already have a Navidrome server setup, but was reluctant to mix it up with these ambient tracks, and setting up something entirely new, such as a Jellyfin server, wasn’t too appealing either. Instead, I looked at my existing Plex setup and decided to create a new library in there just for the ambient music, label it as such, and then have it available to access via its cross-platform Plexamp app.
The end result works really well, I am able to quickly search for a specific sound experience or just scroll through the tracks until one catches my eye. It plays quickly on either of my devices, with the Plexamp being fully featured in showing tracks recently played, recently added, and also my personal ratings for them, making it easy to identify tracks I liked and those I could skip over for now. On the desktop as well, Plexamp can be run quite small and unobtrusively, and looks beautiful too with the theming taking colours from the track’s artwork.
Conclusion
Overall, I would suppose such a process would work with any podcast which provides an RSS feed to access the episodes, and may be useful for archiving favourite shows outside of your usual podcast manager. For me, knowing these were eight-hour long tracks I wanted to keep, I knew simply having them downloaded to my phone was not going to work in the long-term, and am glad they sit in a centralised placed ready for streaming to whatever device Plexamp can run on, though also happy these are just .mp3 files and can be moved to another platform at any time, without a vendor lock in.