That is true. However I would recommend that LibriVox publish this metadata as a distinct XML fragment for each work. Not only for the purposes of the feed generator, but for use by other aggregators that will want to get hold of what are, in effect, bibliographic records.

:)

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt
Section 14.35.1 is what you want.

httplib2 is better than httplib2 for this kind of thing: http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/
docs: http://bitworking.org/projects/httplib2/ref/http-objects.html

Example of using httplib against archive.org to get part of the file:
http://dpaste.com/22843/

Originally I had the script follow that redirect, but the LibriVox folks found it was better to let the RSS reader do that at feed fetch time.

“I believe that ID3 tags are at the end of the MP3 file”

Of course all the metadata comes from the LibriVox database. It could be scraped from the page, or perhaps LibriVox can publish it in a more tractable form.

Making steady progress, I think.

Python is pretty strange. This statement freaked me out:

return x, y, z

and of course:

(x, y, z) = func(p)

But there are currently a couple of issues:

1) request for the mp3 from archive.org returns a 302 – redirect, which shouldn’t be hard to deal with,

2) how is it that reading a 6K chunk in the middle of the file gives you minutes & seconds? Pretty cool. But I believe that ID3 tags are at the end of the MP3 file, so currently, I can retrieve title & artist when I pull down the entire file …. which is significantly larger than 6K.

Unless I can somehow just pull down the portion of the file that contain the ID3 tags.

We’ll see…

Python.

http://jonudell.net/librivox.py
http://jonudell.net/mp3info.py