iTunes feed extractor

The downside of Apple’s iPod/iPhone being so popular is that so many podcasts only publish iTunes links, instead of the more standard RSS/Atom feeds. And I know of OS X and Windows users who detest iTunes — imagine how Unix users feel!

Well, the feeds are still there, but hidden from plain sight — turns out, though, that if you pretend to be iTunes, you can actually trick the iTMS server into giving you the raw data. And with Python 2.6’s built-in support for Apple’s property lists, extracting the feed is a trivial matter.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import plistlib
import urllib2
import sys

ITUNES_VER = '7.4.1'

USER_AGENT = 'iTunes/' + ITUNES_VER

def get_props(url):
    request = urllib2.Request(url)
    request.add_header('User-Agent', USER_AGENT)
    response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
    return plistlib.readPlistFromString(response.read())

def get_feed(url):
    next_url = get_props(url)['action']['url']
    props = get_props(next_url)
    return props['items'][0]['feedURL']
    
if __name__ == '__main__':
    for url in sys.argv[1:]:
        print get_feed(url)

update (2010-08-27)
Apple removed one level of indirection, and the code above can be simplified. For historicity, I’m not editing the displayed code, but apply this patch, either by hand or using ‘patch’:

--- a/itms_extract.py
+++ b/itms_extract.py
@@ -15,8 +15,7 @@ def get_props(url):
     return plistlib.readPlistFromString(response.read())
 
 def get_feed(url):
-    next_url = get_props(url)['action']['url']
-    props = get_props(next_url)
+    props = get_props(url)
     return props['items'][0]['feedURL']
     
 if __name__ == '__main__':

update (2011-04-05)
The latest code, for your convenience, at gist.github.com