Why use huge and intrusive software such as iTunes when a small script is just enough?

I own a NDEO Equinox² OGG/MP3/FM player/recorder which appears in the PC as a simple 512 Mb flash drive. Besides listening to music and radio it is very convenient to move files to/from work and it recharge itself from the USB. It works on any operating system which support USB storage without a special driver and help to stay away from DRM.

I'm also using the storage feature for scripts directly useful for the main usage of this particular flash drive: retrieving podcasts. I have installed GNU wget on all my Windows PCs (this is an invaluable tool that is particularly useful to download big files (see --continue and --limit-rate options) and for mirroring of web sites) so with the following 10 lines cmd.exe script I can download the latest Radio France podcats of the broadcast I missed.

Here is the generic Windows script for any Radio France MP3:

@echo off
setlocal
:: Le numero de podcast est soit sur la ligne de commande
:: soit dans le nom de ce script get-<numero>.cmd
if not "%1"=="" (set n=%1) else (
    for /F "delims=-_ tokens=2" %%i in ("%~n0") do set n=%%i
)
set rss=rss_%n%.xml
wget -O %rss% http://radiofrance-podcast.net/podcast/%rss% || goto :EOF
for /F "tokens=2" %%f in ('findstr "enclosure" %rss%') do set URL=%%f
set URL=%URL:~5,-1%
echo %URL%
wget -c %URL% && del %rss%

It fetches the RSS file, extracts the URL of the MP3 file and downloads it. The podcast number must be either given file as a command line argument or in the name of the file itself. For example to retrieve "France Info - Chronique Jeux Vidéo, just save the script as radiofrance-18963.cmd. Run it today and it will download 18963-18.02.2007-ITEMA_20059064-0.mp3.

Note: I you are behind an HTTP proxy, you have to set the http{,s}_proxy environment variables. For example:

set http_proxy=http://myproxy:3128
set https_proxy=http://myproxy:3128

You can define them once for all in the Windows Control Panel.