CPod Tools are a set of python scripts for ChinesePod users (mainly premium users) with an user interface for OSX 10.4.

The Lesson Stuff Tab

Expansion Tab

From this tab you can

Open a lesson's transcript HTML by Level and Id

  1. Enter level and lesson id (containing the leading zero) into the fields Lesson Level + Id
    The Level has to be in Upper Chars (A, B, C..). a, b, c won't work.
  2. Press the small square button in the top right corner.
    The transcript HTML for the entered Level and Lesson will open in your webbrowser.

Scrape lesson details

You don't have to enter the lesson level, title, id and mp3-link manually. Getting the lesson details is easy: Just open a dialogue or expansion page in Firefox or Safari and press the Scrape... button.

CPodTools Scrape panel

The scrape panel provides three options for fetching the lesson details

  1. Sourcefile: From your browser save the page's HTML source to a file on your disk. Choose that file here in CPodTools. The small square button will open the file for preview.
  2. Safari: CPodTools will save the HTML source of the current, topmost Safari window to a temporary file.
  3. URL: Just click on from Firefox or from Safari to get the current URL into the field. You can also paste or type it in, just take care it's really a CPod fully qualified dialogue or expansion link, including http:// at the beginning. The small square button will open the entered Url for preview.

    If you scrape from an Url, you have to enter your CPod-Logindata to access the page.

If Terminal is running, make sure to have a Terminal window open. Click Run. CPodTools will fetch the needed infos and automatically fill the lesson details field on the Lesson Stuff tab.

Auto-update on scraping:

Download dialog and expansion sentences audio

When Download audio is checked, pressing Run will download the audio files from the the first (0) to Last Mp3-Link to the folder Downloadfolder . The Last Mp3-Link is the the link to the mp3 file with the highest number found in the page. The numbering starts with the dialogue sentences. So if you scrape from an expansion page, the dialogue and expansion sentences will be downloaded. If you scrape from a dialogue page, only the dialogue sentences will be downloaded.

The downloaded files will be named Lesson Level + Lesson Id + Lesson Title + " - " + Sentence number + ".mp3"

Python Scripts

The python scripts involved are:

Run scriptname --help in the terminal to get more info about the standalone usage of those scripts.