Turning this blog into a podcast was fun… But long form articles from other people are actually the ones I want to listen to on my commute.
By running rss2podcast on a cron, we can get a piper read podcast out of any RSS feed!
rss2podcast parses the RSS feed, fetches the full post content via trafilatura by default and pipes the cleaned-up text to gopipertts.
Using the resulting mp3 files, rss2podcast builds a standard podcast feed that can be added in your favorite reader.
Some tweaking is sometimes necessary when trafilatura is involved. For ArsTechnica, which is part of the sample config, I had to merge the .post-content div elements to get the full blog post (articles are split across multiple divs of that class).
If by chance the feed you want to hear embeds the full text, you can disable trafilatura to keep things simple (--no-fetch).
You can check out this podcast from the EFF updates feed for a sample.
Keep in mind that a synthetic voice is reading. TextToSpeech has become quite good, but the audio can still get randomly weird, and trafilatura sometimes needs some adjusting before you get the result you want.
For English, most voices are acceptable, and rss2podcast defaults to en_US-amy-medium. For French, I’m liking fr_FR-siwis-medium.
Happy listening!