Feed to Podcast - Simple Converter
13 July 2007 in Personal Experience & Programming & Software
Just finished my simple application, named Feed to Podcast, that using a given RSS Feed address, converts the posts to Podcast audio files compatible with the most popular devices iPod, Zune, etc.
The application was built just for fun, leveraging the new APIs available in the .NET 3 (WPF and Speech).
The applications is mainly for Windows Vista users. Although it works on Windows XP, the voice available for default (Microsoft Sam) is really annoying on big texts. Microsoft Anna (Windows Vista default voice) is a step forward to voice improvement. It’s not natural human voice, but there have been improvements.
You can download the binaries here, but you will need the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package (not necessary for Windows Vista) and Windows Media Encoder 9 Series (to encode the audio files).
More information, including the source code can be found here. There’s also some known issues, and more likely some unknown. Please free to stress test the application.
I’m already beginning another WPF application. This time a more complex…
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2 comments. Add your own comment.
André says 13 July 2007 @ 10:49
Dude, this is pretty cool (although I haven’t actually tried it, yet). Great work and definitely a good promotion for the platform.
Do you know what would really rock? Building a webservice around this. Sketch up a SOAP interface, with authentication and allow users to request mp3s of their own posts. Not groundbreaking, I’m sure, but definitely more useful.
Good job.
fabiopedrosa says 13 July 2007 @ 15:26
Sure. There are many ways, this could be improved.
The Webservice is not a bad idea, the only “obstacle” would be doing the queue of processing feeds, and notify whenever the process is done. I there’s some good feedback, I will consider extending.
Other problem would be, offering multiple voices. Currently the applications uses the voices you have installed in your OS. Some are more powerful than others. The client-version can always be optimized by downloading new voices. Getting a Webserver with this support, would be almost impossible.
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