Last year, I wrote about creating an ambient music server, because I had received a one year free trial to a service providing RSS podcast feeds of various ambient sounds, and wanted to archive the podcast “episodes” so I could continue to listen to them after the trial had ended.

The process of doing this involved me first downloading the content of the feeds via podcast-dl, storing them in a dedicated Plex library, and playing via the cross-platform Plexamp app.

However, after some recent developments, I have since changed my setup and expanded a little bit, all of which I will go into today in this short post.

AudioBookShelf

As I wrote in my January 2025 update of my self-hosting setup, I was now able to install more on my Synology NAS, thanks to Portainer and guides by Marius Hosting, with AudioBookShelf being one of them to organise and play my messy collection of audiobooks I had accumulated over the years.

Known as ABS, it also has an option to download podcasts via RSS feeds, and that’s what I simply used to replace the previous setup as described in the previous post - I just added the RSS feeds in and left it to do its job. I no longer have to think about running podcast-dl or moving the files across, it’s now all nicely running by itself on my NAS.

But I had an idea while setting up the podcast feeds - wondering if I could get ABS to download RSS feeds of YouTube channels which specialise in relaxing music, guided meditations and ASMR sounds, converting them into audio files as they downloaded? No, ABS couldn’t do that at all, but I really liked this idea…

Pinchflat

My thinking was to go back to how ABS is primarily for audiobooks, which are sourced elsewhere and then placed in accessible folders by the user for AudioBookShelf to index and play - so I could source the converted YouTube videos elsewhere, place them in a folder ABS has access to, and then have everything all in once place.

After some more poking around Marius’s website (as I knew I would want everything to run together on the same NAS), I liked the sound of Pinchflat the best: a service to subscribe, monitor, download and convert YouTube videos through an easy-to-use web GUI, with readable metadata and recognisable thumbnails, where I can point the downloaded folder straight into ABS to index. I followed Marius and his guide again, and everything was setup extremely easily. I created a profile for Pinchflat to process the files exactly as I wanted, added in a few channels, and then watched it as videos began downloading - and gradually appearing in ABS. Success!

Conclusion

I have not had this setup for very long, but at the moment, I have yet to encounter any issues. Not only has this been the best way to preserve the trial podcast files I wanted, but I now have many more calming sounds to easily access all in one place. All I’m wondering now is do I become a full on data hoarder and set up a similar system for the videos of YouTube I want to keep forever…?