Mixcaster is a "proxy" server which allows subscribing to Mixcloud users' music as RSS podcasts, and downloading Mixcloud music files, so you can listen to them offline.
You can subscribe to any of the feeds/collections of music that the Mixcloud user has made available: their stream, shows, favorites, listening history, or playlists. You can then listen to them in the podcast client of your choice.
Some of my favorite music is on Mixcloud, and I like to listen to it in situations where I have little or no network connectivity. When users have joined Mixcloud Select, the Mixcloud mobile app lets you download their music and listen offline, which is great — subscribing is a fantastic way to support those artists, and gain the convenience of offline use. But not all Mixcloud users have joined Select, including many of the ones whose music I like most. This app lets me listen to those users' music offline too.
Mixcaster has two modes of operation: You can run it as a local server, and it will listen for HTTP requests, serving podcast RSS feeds and related music files in response (downloading from Mixcloud as needed); and then you can subscribe to its RSS feeds' URLs in a podcast client. Or, you can run it at a command line, to download some of a Mixcloud user's music to local files, for use however you like.
Downloads from Mixcloud take quite a while — the first ~5 MB is typically sent very quickly, but the rest of the download is then severely rate-limited — so multiple downloads are performed in parallel.
After downloading a release, unzip it to wherever you'd like to keep it, and take a glance through its settings in mixcaster-settings.properties, tweaking them as desired. Then open a terminal and run mixcaster -service to run the service, or mixcaster -install to set the service up as a launchd agent which will run whenever you're logged in.
Then open your podcast app and add a URL. For example, in macOS's Podcasts app, use File > Add a Show by URL; in iOS's, use Library > (...) button in the upper right-hand corner > Add a Show by URL.
The Mixcaster podcast URL is just like the original Mixcloud URL, but replacing https://www.mixcloud.com with your Mixcaster server's hostname and port, which is http://localhost:6499 by default (you can configure the port in mixcaster-settings.properties).
So for example, let's say you want to subscribe to Armada Music's shows. Their Mixcloud URL is https://www.mixcloud.com/ArmadaMusicOfficial/, so you can use http://localhost:6499/ArmadaMusicOfficial/ to subscribe to their shows in Mixcaster.
Or maybe you want to subscribe to their Armada Trance Mixes playlist? The Mixcaster URL for that is http://localhost:6499/ArmadaMusicOfficial/playlists/armada-trance-mixes/.
You can use a bookmarklet on any Mixcloud page that lists music, to load RSS for a podcast containing that music. Browse to your Mixcaster server's root (probably http://localhost:6499) for easy access to the bookmarklet.
When you first subscribe to a user's music, Mixcaster won't have had a chance to download their music files from Mixcloud yet. Mixcaster tries to make this clear by appending [DOWNLOADING, CAN'T PLAY YET] to the title of any episode whose music file isn't fully downloaded yet, because trying to play those podcast episodes won't work. Just wait a few minutes, and when your podcast app next refreshes the podcast (or when you refresh it manually, if you're the impatient type), some or all of the episodes' files will have finished downloading, and you'll be able to play them.
By the way, the first request to Mixcaster for a podcast's RSS XML, before its music files have been fully downloaded, also runs a bit slowly — taking 10 seconds or more to complete — because Mixcaster has to issue a HEAD request to Mixcloud's servers for each music file in order to populate the podcast's list of episodes.
One way to minimize both of those minor hassles is to have Mixcaster "watch" the music you're interested in. Which brings us to...
Mixcaster can watch specific Mixcloud users or playlists for you. It will periodically check Mixcloud for new music in the background, and immediately download any it finds. When the timing works out well, Mixcaster will notice new music and download it before your podcast app queries it, (mostly) avoiding the annoyance of opening your podcast client and seeing [DOWNLOADING, CAN'T PLAY YET].
You can list the users and playlists you'd like for Mixcaster to watch in mixcaster-watches.conf, and configure how often it checks Mixcloud for new music in mixcaster-settings.properties.
You can pass a Mixcloud URL that lists music to Mixcaster, and it'll download music files listed on that page.
For example: mixcaster -download https://www.mixcloud.com/ArmadaMusicOfficial/uploads/
Run mixcaster -help for full usage details, including options which limit how many music files will be downloaded, and tell Mixcaster where to put them.
Podcast apps tend to sort episodes by their publication date. This works out well when you subscribe to a user's stream or shows, which Mixcloud also shows in publication-date order.
Mixcloud shows users' favorites and listening history sorted by the date when they were favorited or listened to, though, and that date is not exposed in Mixcloud's GraphQL API. Similarly, playlists have an arbitrary user-defined order. In each of these cases, Mixcloud's website preserves that sorting by showing items in the order they're returned by Mixcloud's APIs. Mixcaster takes the same approach, and also retains Mixcloud's ordering in the RSS XML it generates — but podcast apps generally ignore the "physical" ordering of the podcast's XML, and instead sort episodes by their original publication date.
Long story short, podcast apps usually show podcasts containing users' favorites, history and playlists sorted by the music's original publication date, not by the date it was favorited or listened to by the user. This hasn't bothered me enough to do anything about it. 🤷
If you move Mixcaster to a different folder:
- Keep its files together; for instance, if its properties file isn't in the same folder as its jar file, it won't be found, and default settings will be used instead
- If you've installed it as a launchd agent, re-run
mixcaster -installfrom its new location to keep the launchd agent working
You can remove the launchd agent with mixcaster -uninstall.
The program is written in Java, so it should in theory work on any modern OS, with appropriate configuration... but I've only actually tested it on macOS, and wouldn't be surprised to learn that it breaks in various odd ways on another OS, especially Windows.
I made Mixcaster for my own purposes, but if it's useful to you, that's great! If it's almost useful to you, but you wish it behaved just a little differently, feel free to ask. And even better, if you'd like to tweak or improve it, and you think others would like your changes, well then your pull request is welcome! 🙂