PodRacer

A podcast catch-up service running on your very own server!

I'm running one at podracer.zachn.me, feel free to take the service for a spin. I'm planning on keeping this up and available for free, but I'm not making any promises -- if it starts to get swamped I'll have to figure out something more scalable.

Features

Time shift podcasts - Have a favorite show that died out and want to relive it? PodRacer lets you experience it anew by creating a feed where the first episode was published today.
Two rate-control modes
- Variable publishing rate - Do you want to catch up on serial podcast? Set the rate to be > 1x and PodRacer will scale the shifted publish dates, letting you slowly (or quickly) catch up to real time. Podcasts coming at you too fast? Set the rate to be < 1x to make a bi-weekly show weekly, or a weekly show bi-weekly.
- Publish every X days - For archived podcasts that have all episodes "published" on the same day, PodRacer can set a fixed amount of time between each episode, restoring the periodic publishing feel.
Integrates new episodes - Once you catch up, PodRacer integrates the new episodes as they are published, seamlessly transferring you over to the "normal" listening experience.
Self hosted - complete autonomy over your feeds.

PodRacer is most useful if you prefer to listen to your podcasts as they are published (i.e. they are dropped into a feed, and you just listen in order). It lets legacy content seamlessly fit into the stream of contemporary content.

Tests were done against Overcast (info). Other podcast players might have quirks I didn't see. Feel free to file a github issue and I'll do what I can to fix it up.

Podcast Archiver

There is also a small utility tool podarch, used to archive all the episodes of a given feed. See podarch -h for usage.

Installation

I run this service on a Raspberry Pi 3.

rustup update && cargo update && cargo build --release

It's going to take a very long time to build. That's Rust.

Sometimes (not quite sure why only sometimes) my Pi3 struggles to build when multiple threads are enabled (the default). You can cargo clean && cargo build --release -j 1 to force building with only one thread. This will take way longer, but you don't run out of memory.

Builds go much faster on beefier hardware. Cross-compile by installing cross (via cargo install cross), then building for the Pi:

cross build --release --target=armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf --features vendored-openssl

The binary will end up in target/armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/release.

Start the server

cargo run --release --bin podracer

Podcast clients will need to access the server remotely, so you will have to set up port forwarding in your router.

Keeping the process alive

You can either run in a tmux instance or use nohup and send it to the background. I've set it up as a systemd service, but that is beyond the scope of this README.

Docker method

If you wish to run PodRacer using docker, you can use the following run command:

docker run -d -v podracer_podcasts:/app/podcasts/ -p 41968:41968/tcp --name podracer ghcr.io/znielsen/podracer:latest

Contributing

License

Licensed under either of

Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Donating

If you like it then you shoulda thrown a dollar at it.

If you found PodRacer useful, a donation would be great! Recommended $1/podcast (as in per feed run through the service, not per episode). No pressure, but supporting software you like is cool.

Maintainers

Zach Nielsen - @ZNielsen

ZNielsen / PodRacer