App that can turn archived/streaming audio into podcasts..?

Cafe Society
1

I love podcasts, and listen to them so regularly that I frequently run out of new episodes of my favorites. Often, however, there are archived episodes that are available online…but not in the podcast feed. (Example: my podcast feed of NPR’s Fresh Air just goes back to January, but Fresh Air’s archive goes back years on their website.)

Is there an app I can download that will allow me to click on a streaming link (such as from NPR’s archives) and turn the episode into a podcast episode that I can listen to offline? Any ideas?

2

Audio podcasts are mp3’s. At least in itunes. Download the file, drag into itunes. Right-click, go to Get Info then change from music to podcast.

Basically. I may have missed something minor, but it’s easy to figure out from there.

3

Thanks for the tip. I don’t have iTunes on my computer; I just download podcasts directly to the podcast app on my cellphone. Any way to do this directly from a phone?

4

If you go to the webpage on your phone, and touch the link to the archived episode, it should just play. It’s just an audio file, and all phones play most of them.

5

OP wants to store them to listen offline.

There is probably not a way to do this from a phone. An individual podcast is just an mp3 file. A podcast that you subscribe to from a phone app is an RSS feed (which is basically just a particularly-formatted text description of where the episodes are).

So, in order to make your phone podcast app subscribe, you need to find an RSS feed of it. There are a few online RSS feed generators, but I couldn’t find one that claimed to make podcast RSS feeds (which have their own special format). On a lark, I tried feedity.com on the Fresh Air archive page, selecting the download links on the Fresh Air archive website, and… it didn’t work.

This is probably something that any competent programmer could hack together in a few hours for a single website, and someone who already knew how podcast RSS is formatted and had some webscraping knowledge could make it even faster. But there doesn’t appear to be an existing general solution.