Here’s one of the reasons to have your own permanent server: The New York Times has a daily feature called, not surprisingly, “The Daily“. It’s a short 15-20 minute news segment, ready by 6 AM. It’s available through Google Play Music or iTunes, but I leave for work by 6:15, and I don’t want to use up cell data downloading something that should arrive on my phone just before I leave the house. Of course, there’s no obvious way to tell Google Play, “I know it’s there; go get it right now”. I don’t know the iPhone experience, but I imagine it’s the same. I want to download on my time, not on Google or Apple’s schedule.
Luckily, there’s an RSS feed for this podcast. That, plus this simple script on my DragonFly system, means I can pull it down whenever I’m ready:
fetch -o – http://feeds.podtrac.com/zKq6WZZLTlbM | grep enclosure | cut -d ‘”‘ -f2 | xargs fetch -m
So, it’s a matter of running that script, and syncing off my own local storage, on my own schedule. FolderSync Lite will happily sync back to my phone using sftp.
If the podcast is ready at 6am. Why isn’t it downloading at 6am?
Or for you to simply download it before you leave. On wifi, I can’t imagine the podcast takin more than 30 sec to download.
Just because the New York Times has it done by 6 AM doesn’t mean Google Play Music has copied it over and made it available by 6:15 AM. I could manually pull the file every morning, but there’s no reason to repeat a manual process when a computer can do it for you.
So, yes, it is downloaded. It’s automatic.