Tools for Podcasts, Audiobooks, and EPubs
Dec. 26th, 2024 07:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
volkameria posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
datahoardersThis is a tutorial and recommended tool list for managing podcasts, audiobooks, and Ebooks. I hope you all get some use out of these! If you have any additional questions, comments, or recommendations, please let me know.
EBooks
EBooks are best stored as an .epub; it's the smallest type of file and is native to all e-readers. You may see filetypes like .kepub (Kobo Epub) or .azw/azw3 (Amazon... something or other), but these are proprietary and not guaranteed to work on all devices. .epubs is one of the options for downloading fics on AO3 as well;bedes has a great mass AO3 downloaded linked on their resource post! .epubs do require applications designed to open them, though, so they're not as plug and play as a .pdf is.
I highly recommend Calibre for organizing all of those .epubs. There are several plugins available for Calibre that will also strip DRM from books purchased from Amazon or Kobo; while I won't provide any links here, DuckDuckGo/Reddit can point you in the right direction if you're so inclined.
Podcasts
My ride or die tool here is podcast-dl. It works with any RSS feed for a podcast, so if you have access to one from Patreon or a free feed, you can paste it in. Pretty much any podcast on an app or Spotify will have an RSS feed *somewhere*, so hunt around for one. This is a command line tool, but it has great documentation. It even has options for autofilling with the correct metadata, so you don't have to do anything after the fact!
The instructions provided on the github are for people who have cloned the branch locally and have already set up npm/node. If you go to the Releases tab, there's also an option for running this via a Windows executable (.exe) file; instructions for doing this are below.
Windows Instructions:
Amazon will pull audiobooks from your library even if you've purchased them; this has happened with multiple books I've bought on Audible. To strip DRM from Audible books and have a local copy, I recommend Libation - this is also a management tool for updating tags and sorting everything on your machine. It has a UI and extensive documentation, so no command line knowledge or code knowledge is required for this!
EBooks
EBooks are best stored as an .epub; it's the smallest type of file and is native to all e-readers. You may see filetypes like .kepub (Kobo Epub) or .azw/azw3 (Amazon... something or other), but these are proprietary and not guaranteed to work on all devices. .epubs is one of the options for downloading fics on AO3 as well;
bedes has a great mass AO3 downloaded linked on their resource post! .epubs do require applications designed to open them, though, so they're not as plug and play as a .pdf is.I highly recommend Calibre for organizing all of those .epubs. There are several plugins available for Calibre that will also strip DRM from books purchased from Amazon or Kobo; while I won't provide any links here, DuckDuckGo/Reddit can point you in the right direction if you're so inclined.
Podcasts
My ride or die tool here is podcast-dl. It works with any RSS feed for a podcast, so if you have access to one from Patreon or a free feed, you can paste it in. Pretty much any podcast on an app or Spotify will have an RSS feed *somewhere*, so hunt around for one. This is a command line tool, but it has great documentation. It even has options for autofilling with the correct metadata, so you don't have to do anything after the fact!
The instructions provided on the github are for people who have cloned the branch locally and have already set up npm/node. If you go to the Releases tab, there's also an option for running this via a Windows executable (.exe) file; instructions for doing this are below.
Windows Instructions:
- Open your command prompt and navigate to the folder you have the tool stored in. In my case, it's in /Users/<logged_in_user>/Downloads/Tools. So, type in "cd C:\path\to\folder", where path to folder is wherever the executable file is.
- Write out the full .exe name, and any additional flags you want to include. This would look like "podcast-dl-9.3.4-win-x64.exe --after 12/01/2024 --url https://pinecast.com/feed/pretending-to-be-people". The only things you really need are the --url flag, a valid .rss file or link, and the executable, but you can specify any sort of date range, metadata download, etc. from the documentation on the github!
Amazon will pull audiobooks from your library even if you've purchased them; this has happened with multiple books I've bought on Audible. To strip DRM from Audible books and have a local copy, I recommend Libation - this is also a management tool for updating tags and sorting everything on your machine. It has a UI and extensive documentation, so no command line knowledge or code knowledge is required for this!
