Five Years of podcast-dl

I recently published v11.4.0 of podcast-dl and noticed that this small project is now over five years old. It started as a simple, personal script for grabbing premium podcast feeds to host on my Plex server (it continues to do that very well), but now it's a full podcast download multitool. Need transcripts and other metadata? It can grab those. Need to name the downloaded episodes in a hyperspecific way for your app of choice? It can do that too.

The ongoing trend of podcasts transitioning to video-first might mean that tools like podcast-dl become increasingly irrelevant. Many new shows only publish to YouTube and Spotify and do not offer an RSS feed at all. Patreon-exclusive feeds now have integration with Spotify, so you can seal yourself into that tomb from the inside. Hey, at least yt-dlp works now.

For now, podcast-dl still has plenty of feeds left, and it'll stick around as long as the open web allows.