Textcast alternative for RSS to podcast-like MP3s in iTunes via Automator
Whew! What a long title! Yep, I’m doing it to help Google out, sorry.
Long ago, I was trying to do some crazy shit with Automator and it involved Variables. I might have been doing some renaming stuff, don’t recall exactly, but I found this helpful macworld article titled THE SCRIPT IS IN THE FOLLOWING LINKED ARTICLE, COMMENTER “Gi” Automator Power: Variables and looping. It isn’t as easy to find as it should be, because its title isn’t as informative. The thing is, it does exactly what Textcast does, for free.
What does Textcast do? It apparently can turn Text, E-mail, and RSS feeds into personal podcasts (I don’t know if it has a built in webserver for RSS, which would be neat). The thing is, the automator script in the article above can get an RSS feed, and turn the text of the articles into mp3s, which are then inserted into an iTunes Playlist… exactly what Textcast does, but for $25 less. (By the way, you can have the say command piped into an mp3 file, like say -v alex -o audiofile.mp3 -f textfile.txt and it will have alex output the contents of textfile.txt to audiofile.mp3.)
Save yourself $25 then spend it by using our Amazon searchbox on the right to get something you REALLY want. For example, iLife 09.
Gi had this to say,
February 10, 2009 @ 5:35 pm
Well, ok. But I didn’t get the idea – where is the “Free solution for RSS to podcast”? Where is the script/GUI whatever? Cause, if you can manually run some command in terminal, it is not the same as having a complete solution which does all the job by just clicking “Sync”. That’s where the 25$ go.
Gi had this to say,
February 11, 2009 @ 2:50 am
Ok, Now I got it
I read through the article and it seemed more like feature review to me, not a complete workflow. There is actually a download link in this article: http://find.macworld.com/3259