A while back I wrote local-podcast-generator as an Android app. It is just a fork of a simple http server that generates an RSS feed for the files in a given directory. There are a few more things I need to work out in it before it is fully released.

What is it?

You give it a directory on your phone, and it creates a podcast feed based on the files in that directory. You can take that feed and add it to your favorite podcast player. It does not recursively explore down the file tree.

Why?

Let’s say you have a series of audio lectures or audio books downloaded to your phone. You’ve tried to listen to them in a media player, like VLC, but this isn’t optimal. Media players don’t keep track of which episodes you have listened to, and they can lose your place. If you take time off from listening, you can come back to your podcast player and pick up right where you left off. Podcast apps are designed for this type of long form, episodic audio content.

I’ve tried to listen to librevox audio files in VLC, but it really is just inferior to a podcast app. That’s why librevox offers rss feeds for their audio books. But some of my audio content comes from CDs, and so feeds don’t exist for them. Hosting them as an RSS feed seems to be overkill, and would require you to download them over network. Running the podcast generator app keeps everything local.

Download

Get the apk release from here. You should hopefully be able to install that (I’m still figuring out how to build and distribute apk releases, so let me know if there are any issues).