How to get the original RSS feed for a podcast in iTunes

As you probably already know, I run a company called Callisto.fm with a couple of other guys. We're always looking for ways to make the process of submitting feeds to Callisto as easy as possible. It's easy enough to just copy and paste a podcast's RSS feed into our suggestion box, but sometimes a podcaster only provides the iTunes link.

Having an iTunes link to the podcast helps if a) you have iTunes installed, and b) if you go ahead and subscribe to the podcast, click the (I) icon, and write down (no, Apple won't let you copy the text) the URL of the original feed. There are reasons Apple wants to prevent you from having the original URL, but we'll save that for another post.

itunesFeedExtractor is written to be run from the command line on a unix like operating system. It requires a command line PHP engine and should run on PHP 4 or 5. You'll also need curl installed.

The PHP script takes am iTunes viewPodcast URL as an argument, and will output the original feed URL.

Here's an example:

php ./itunesFeedExtractor.php http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=338395203

will output:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/blipcasts

Before you ask why it won't take a simple ID as the argument, a copy and paste of the entire URL is actually faster for me. This was written for me after all. 🙂

If you run a Linux machine or other OS and don't have iTunes installed, you can still enjoy the podcasts contained “only” in the iTunes Music Store. Just run thisitunesFeedExtractor and use the URL you get back in your favorite podcatcher.

If you make changes to this code, by all means submit a DIFF back to me. I'll be happy to include your changes.

Download itunesFeedExtractor here: itunesFeedExtractor

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