Python - Create RSS / Podcast of MP3 files

Anyway, a nice guy called Dan Goff left a comment on my post about creating a RSS / podcast file using Python letting me know that he had taken my code template and modified it to use the Mutagen library to pick up certain values from the ID3 tags inside MP3 files.

Dan says:

I’m populating the title for each entry and the description directly from the ID3 tags provided using the Mutagen library.
I ran into an issue with my podcatching software, because the files are only tagged with the year and not a full date, so part of the code is to take a fully-formatted date string and write it back to the file so that it is listed correctly when my software “downloads” the file from the feed.
Also, I ran into an issue with some Unicode characters in the description (mostly an ellipsis), so I took the quick-and-dirty (and probably not exactly correct) route and just converted everything in the description field to ASCII before writing it out to the feed.

Dan has also kindly agreed to let me share his code:

# update
environment to handle Unicode

PYTHONIOENCODING="utf-8"

# import libraries

import os

import sys

import datetime

import time

# import constants from stat library

from stat import * # ST_SIZE ST_MTIME

# import ID3 tag reader

from mutagen.id3 import ID3, ID3TimeStamp, TDRC

from time import strptime, strftime

# format date method

def formatDate(dt):

    return dt.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y
%H:%M:%S +0000")

# get the item/@type based on file extension

def getItemType(fileExtension):

    if fileExtension ==
"aac":

         mediaType =
"audio/mpeg"

    elif fileExtension ==
"mp4":

         mediaType =
"video/mpeg"

    else:

         mediaType =
"audio/mpeg"

    return mediaType

# constants

# the podcast name

rssTitle = "The podcast title"

# the podcast description

rssDescription = "The podcast description"

# the url where the podcast items will be hosted

rssSiteURL = http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

# the url of the folder where the items will be stored

rssItemURL = rssSiteURL + "/Podcasts"

# the url to the podcast html file

rssLink = rssSiteURL #+ ""

# url to the podcast image

rssImageUrl = rssSiteURL #+ "/logo.jpg"

# the time to live (in minutes)

rssTtl = "60"

# contact details of the web master

rssWebMaster = "me@me.com"

#record datetime started

now = datetime.datetime.now()

# command line options

#    - python createRSFeed.py
/path/to/podcast/files /path/to/output/rss

# directory passed in

rootdir = sys.argv[1]

# output RSS filename

outputFilename = sys.argv[2]

# Main program

# open rss file

outputFile = open(outputFilename, "w")

# write rss header

outputFile.write("<?xml version=\"1.0\"
encoding=\"UTF-8\" ?>\n")

outputFile.write("<rss version=\"2.0\">\n")

outputFile.write("<channel>\n")

outputFile.write("<title>" + rssTitle +
"</title>\n")

outputFile.write("<description>" + rssDescription +
"</description>\n")

outputFile.write("<link>" + rssLink +
"</link>\n")

outputFile.write("<ttl>" + rssTtl +
"</ttl>\n")

outputFile.write("<image><url>" + rssImageUrl +
"</url><title>" + rssTitle +
"</title><link>" + rssLink +
"</link></image>\n")

outputFile.write("<copyright>mart
2012</copyright>\n")

outputFile.write("<lastBuildDate>" + formatDate(now) +
"</lastBuildDate>\n")

outputFile.write("<pubDate>" + formatDate(now) +
"</pubDate>\n")

outputFile.write("<webMaster>" + rssWebMaster +
"</webMaster>\n")

# walk through all files and subfolders

for path, subFolders, files in os.walk(rootdir):

    for file in files:

        # split the file based on
"." we use the first part as the title and the extension to work out
the media type

        fileNameBits =
file.split(".")

        # get the full path of the
file

        fullPath = os.path.join(path,
file)

        # get the stats for the
file

        fileStat =
os.stat(fullPath)

        # find the path relative to the
starting folder, e.g. /subFolder/file

        relativePath =
fullPath[len(rootdir):]

      # Extract ID3 info

      #title

      audio = ID3(fullPath)

      fileTitle =
audio["TIT2"].text[0]

      #date

      datePos =
fileTitle.find(":")

      fileDate =
fileTitle[(datePos+2):]

      fileDate = time.strptime(fileDate,
"%B %d, %Y")

      #correct date format in the file's
ID3 tag

      fileTS =
ID3TimeStamp(time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d", fileDate))

      audio['TDRC'] = TDRC(0,
[fileTS])

      #description

      fileDesc =
audio["COMM::'eng'"].text[0]

      fileDesc = fileDesc.encode('ascii',
'ignore') #converts everything to ASCII prior to writing out

      audio.save()

        # write rss item

outputFile.write("<item>\n")

        #outputFile.write("<title>"
+ fileNameBits[0].replace("_", " ") +
"</title>\n")

      outputFile.write("<title>"
+ fileTitle + "</title>\n")

#outputFile.write("<description>A
description</description>\n")

outputFile.write("<description>" + fileDesc + "</description>\n")

outputFile.write("<link>" + rssItemURL + relativePath +
"</link>\n")

outputFile.write("<guid>" + rssItemURL + relativePath +
"</guid>\n")

#outputFile.write("<pubDate>" +
formatDate(datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(fileStat[ST_MTIME])) +
"</pubDate>\n")

      outputFile.write("<pubDate>"
+ time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d", fileDate) +
"</pubDate>\n")

outputFile.write("<enclosure url=\"" + rssItemURL +
relativePath + "\" length=\"" + str(fileStat[ST_SIZE]) +
"\" type=\"" +
getItemType(fileNameBits[len(fileNameBits)-1]) + "\"
/>\n")

outputFile.write("</item>\n")

# write rss footer

outputFile.write("</channel>\n")

outputFile.write("</rss>")

outputFile.close()

print "complete"

Thanks again to Dan.