How to listen to a “podcast” without iTunes installed
For the last few months or so, I’ve been doing a radio show with the Combobreaker crew themed on comedic yet honest video game reviews. We don’t really have a typical show format, but we usually end up discussing game play mechanics, character control, level design, music, overall fun factor, overall stupidity factor, and, occassionally, we dip into the political side of the gaming industry. Be sure to check out our shows here and our 8-bit t-shirts here.
On to the guts of the post… If you clicked the above link to the podcast and you don’t have iTunes installed, you’ll be prompted to install it before continuing. As a fan of Winamp on Windows and XMMS on Linux, I simply do not have room for iTunes in my life. The last time I installed iTunes—this was a while ago—I recall the installer program completely destroying the directory structure of my music archive and renaming every file to conform to the iTunes catalog. Never again.
The good news is that you can usually get at the audio content without iTunes installed. When you get to the page that says “We are unable to find iTunes on your computer” view the source and check out the onload attribute of the body tag:
The first parameter of the call to itmsOpen holds an itms:// URL. Now, if you had iTunes installed, this link would naturally open up with iTunes, but we do not. Fortunately, the itms:// scheme is actually just XML over HTTP, so we can replace itms:// with http://.
View the XML document in your browser, or download it, and search for instances of the string episodeURL. After each instance, you’ll find a string element containing a URL of the episode:
And there you have it.
For next time, maybe I’ll rant on Apple’s anti-human marketing tactics, e.g., the injection of the word “podcast” into web vernacular. I still feel uneasy saying “podcast” but I just can’t beat ‘em.
