rays
63e192767d
For anyone who turns DeadAir on, a background task makes each episode a
copy with every silence quieter than -38 dB for over 0.35 s shortened to
0.2 s. Nothing is re-encoded: ffmpeg copies the original's frames and
leaves the silent ones out, about 11 s for an hour of MP3 in a release
build. On Brad & Will's episode 359 that is 520 cuts and 3.3 minutes
saved, the copy decodes clean, and it has no isolated spikes in its
silences that the original lacks.
Cuts are made from the middle of each silence, keeping 0.1 s at each
end, so the frames either side of a cut are silent: decoding blends a
frame with the one before it, and an MP3 frame can begin in the bytes of
the frame before, so the first frame after a cut decodes against the
wrong neighbour. Inside a silence nobody hears that; at a word they would.
Positions stay in the original's time and the server converts them both
ways. The iOS and Android apps save positions themselves from their own
player, even while the page is asleep, so converting in the page would
have stored the copy's times as the original's. /media/{id}/deadair
serves the copy at its own address and records that this person is
playing it; a position saved meanwhile is converted from the copy's
clock, as is the length a player measures.
The copy is made by a task of its own, not the worker: a first pass over
a library is hours of ffmpeg, and scans must not wait behind it. It
checks every two minutes, which covers new downloads, files already
downloaded, a switch turned on and a file downloaded again with one rule.
Episodes everyone who would hear the copy has finished get none.
download::remove deletes a copy with its original, and the quota counts
copies.
Settings: the switch is PATCH /api/me {deadair}, a feed kept out is
PATCH /api/feeds/{id} {deadair: false}. GET /api/me gives the switch and
deadair_saved, the seconds saved on episodes heard 75% or more on a copy,
each counted once. Three new tables, so no ALTER.
The image gains Debian's ffmpeg, about 480 MB, in a layer that stays
cached until the base image changes. The player's switch, the feed
setting and the stat come next, after mockups.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ipx
A self-hosted podcatcher for a household. It checks your feeds, downloads the episodes, and serves
a web UI modelled on the 2004 Mac app iPodderX, for any number of people sharing one copy of
the files. One Rust binary, ipx, is both the daemon and the command line.
It is a rewrite of ipodderx-core, the Python engine behind iPodderX (2004-2008, Ray Slakinski & August Trometer).
What it does
- The web UI. It has a toolbar, and a feed list that opens with the Directory, Currently Listening and All Subscriptions. Items sit in a sortable table with a Files pane, and there is a player bar. It comes in Dark, Light and Classic themes, and works on a phone.
- Several people, one copy. Each person has their own subscriptions and their own read, pinned and playback state. There is one file on disk per episode, however many people want it. People sign in with a password or through a proxy (Cloudflare Zero Trust or Authentik), and admins manage accounts and settings.
- Scanning. Feeds are checked on a schedule, globally or per feed, and a feed's own TTL is honoured. Keyword, explicit-content and media-type filters decide what is downloaded, with a limit on how many of a feed's newest episodes are downloaded.
- Downloads. Files come over HTTP or BitTorrent and are filed into a folder per feed. Retention deletes the oldest files to stay under a disk quota or an age limit, and never touches an item someone has pinned.
- OPML. You can import and export your own subscriptions. You can also subscribe to an OPML URL, which keeps a whole list in step as a folder.
Run it
With Docker:
docker build -t ipx .
docker compose up -d
docker-compose.yml is set up for the author's own server. Point its image and its three volumes
(/config, /data and /downloads) at yours first. The UI is on port 8099. BitTorrent uses 6881
over TCP and UDP. Files are written as PUID/PGID, 99:100 by default.
From source:
cargo build --release
./target/release/ipx daemon
The first start creates admin / ipodderx. Sign in at /login, then change it:
echo -n 'a good password' | ipx user passwd admin
The UI is plain HTTP, so put TLS in front of it if it is reachable from outside your network.
Documentation
| docs/configuration.md | Every config key, path and environment variable |
| docs/cli.md | Every command, including ipx user |
| docs/users.md | Accounts, and what several people share |
| docs/sso.md | Signing in through Cloudflare Zero Trust or Authentik |
| docs/architecture.md | How it works: modules, schema, control socket, HTTP API |
| CHANGELOG.md | What changed, by release |
| CLAUDE.md | Notes for working on the code, including how production is deployed |
Tests
cargo test # the engine: parsing, filters, retention, schedules, SQL, per-user state
node tests/page-smoke.js # the page script loads without throwing
node tests/native-bridge.js # the page hands playback to a native shell
npx playwright test # a real browser against a real daemon on fixture feeds
npm install gets the test runner, and npx playwright install --with-deps chromium gets the
browser.
License
MIT, see LICENSE. The icons are Font Awesome Free 7.3.1 by @fontawesome, under CC BY 4.0, embedded as SVG.