TL;DR

RaiPlaySound has an interesting selection of audiobooks (in Italian), and LiberLiber has audiobooks too!

If you’re interested into listening to audiobooks in Italian for free, you’re kinda out of luck. I mean, there’s definitely a selection, but not even comparable to what’s available in English (or many other languages).

Most of what I found online is from LiberLiber (here), which is interesting but a bit limited, being restricted to public domain material only. It’s great and it’s very easy to download audiobooks for offline listening.

More recently I found that RaiPlaySound has a section about audiobooks too. Alas, it seems that we are able to get audiobooks for offline listening only accessing the service through the App for mobile or tablet devices, while the web access is only restricted to streaming.

This is both unfortunate and irritating, considering that RaiPlaySound is a service by Rai, which in turn is the national television which gets public money, mine included.

Anyway, they decided that they should have a walled garden and strict control over what and when and where we citizens can listen to stuff that they’re paying… but they know better, right? Right?!?

For this reason, I will not reiterate my enthusiasm for Cosmic mitmproxy, possibly dumping traffic in a file:

$ mitmdump --flow-detail=2 --showhost | tee session.txt

I wonder if it would be able to capture anything if we then set the browser to use it as a proxy and then click around in an audiobook’s page, possibly for later extraction with a couple of regular expressions…

$ grep -Po '\A\S+\s+(?mxs:GET|HEAD)\s+\K\S+' session.txt > urls.txt
$ grep -Po '\Ahttps://creative.*?\.mp3' urls.txt | sort -u > urls-mp3.txt

Does the second regular expression work? Will it tomorrow? Who knows?

Finally, who knows whether curl will be available to download those URLs with just the default settings, or fail miserably? I discovered that there’s no way to give it a file with a list of urls, so will xargs do the trick?

$ xargs -n 1 curl -LO <urls-mp3.txt

Well, I guess that I will never know…

Moving on to a totally different topic, I figured that the Awesome exiftool, together with Romeo, can do wonders to organize a few MP3 files you might have around:

$ cat m3u-template.tp2
#EXTM3U
#EXTALB: [% 0.Album %]
#EXTART: [% 0.Artist %]
#EXTGENRE: [% 0.Genre %]
[%
   for my $item (A) {
      my ($h, $m, $s) = $item->{Duration} =~ m{(\d+)}gmxs;
      $s += 60 * ($m + 60 * $h);
%]
#EXTINF:[%= $s %],[%= $item->{Title} %]
[%= $item->{SourceFile} %]
[% } %]

$ exiftool -j -q -Artist -Year -Genre -Album -Title -Duration *.mp3 \
  | romeo tp -t m3u-template.tp2 > playlist.m3u

OK, not too much for today, but some days can be a bit weaker, can’t they?

Stay safe!