How to download All Things Considered

August 8, 2005 10:33 AM

Where can I download National Public Radio's All Things Considered or Morning Edition in MP3 format? I was doing this as an Audible subscriber, but they discontinued it. I have searched for podcasts, and of course the NPR site and can't find anything. I have a computer program that records the broadcasts from the NPR website, but in real time, which takes forever. Also, just out of curiosity, does anyone know why Audible stopped doing this? Thanks
posted by rabbus to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

I record this and a dozen other shows using audio hijack pro on my Mac. I use the built in scheduler, so everything happens automatically. I record them as they are broadcast via wnyc's mp3 stream and then drop them on my ipod. What I'm thinking about doing is writing up some ruby goodness to make a local podcast link to the shows so that my ipod automatically picks up the content and expires old shows.

If you live on the west coast you should be able to get the show pretty early from an east coast broadcast.
posted by n9 at 11:13 AM on August 8, 2005

You want to use Streamripper to grab the files from a station that broadcasts it (KCRW will do the job, I think).

I have a system which automatically grabs programms and then places them in iTunes for me. I'll come back and paste the details in a bit
posted by ascullion at 12:10 PM on August 8, 2005

This may help.
posted by jjg at 12:34 PM on August 8, 2005

odinsdream: This shows you how to download and convert Real audio files (which is the format used on the NPR site) to mp3 via the command line, but it would some advanced scripting to be able to schedule it. If you do get it scripted, release it; I'd like to use it.
posted by bitpart at 1:48 PM on August 8, 2005

I cap the programs I want to listen to with my RadioShark, over the air. It lacks some of the convenience and pause-free nature of the streams but all of the ones I looked at 6+ months are were a little... dicey. At least as far as doing it automatically - I didn't want to have to remember to click at the CarTalk website every week, I just wanted the recordings to be there when I remembered to sync.
posted by phearlez at 2:11 PM on August 8, 2005

odinsdream: If you want to skip the converting step (and also avoid waiting hours for the Real files to appear on npr.org) you can schedule to record in real time. And if you choose a station that streams in mp3 format, it's very easy. Mplayer is what you need, and here's a sample command line that I use (in Windows, but the Linux syntax should be the same):

mplayer -playlist http://www.wuga.org/wuga-hi.pls -dumpstream -dumpfile output.mp3

I'll leave the scheduling part to you, since I'm not much of a cron wiz.
posted by llamateur at 2:14 PM on August 8, 2005

By the way, a lot of the stations out there are fairly low quality (and some are of horrendous quality, like 24 kbit). Here are my favorite streams, all in 128 kbit mp3 format:

KCRW: http://www.kcrw.com/pls/kcrwsimulcast.pls
KSLU: http://147.174.55.20:8000/listen.pls
WEMU: http://www.wemu.org/WEMU-broadband.m3u
WESU: http://radio.wesleyan.edu:8000/listen.pls
WUGA: http://www.wuga.org/wuga-hi.pls
posted by llamateur at 2:20 PM on August 8, 2005

I believe that I read recently that All Things Considered and This American Life are not renewing their (separate) Audible.com contracts, because they plan to offer their shows as podcasts (I guess Audible insisted on being the exclusive streaming distributor of the shows).

Which would be nice: I'd rather listen to these shows on my own schedule. I love This American Life beyond all reason, and have put all their shows on minidisc.
posted by curtm at 2:40 PM on August 8, 2005

Curtm- That would be fabulous. Let's hope you're right.
posted by selfnoise at 5:20 PM on August 8, 2005

WREK streams in both 24 kbps and 128 kbps rates. But that's not NPR.

I've been using WUNC for my NPR streaming. Live-only though, so you have to use one of the above-mentioned capture mechanisms.
posted by intermod at 6:11 PM on August 8, 2005

As ascullion mentioned, you can use streamripper to rip mp3s from NPR. That page has step-by-step instructions on how you can go about it (including setting up Scheduled Tasks in Windows).
posted by Handcoding at 7:58 PM on August 8, 2005

Response by poster: First, thank you all. I've been recording All Things Considered from it's website, using IRecord, which is a cheap shareware for Macs recording audio from the web. But, as stated, it's real time and therefore inconvenient -- you have to wait for the program to be available on the NPR website, then record it, which takes an hour or so, making it not available until late in the day here. You can schedule recordings, but so far, I've had glitches in trying to do this. It was just so much more convenient to use Audible, which was a one minute download. If that's true about Audible's wanting exclusivity, it's a mistake on their part. I'm about to cancel Audible because they no longer have the NPR stuff, and I would have been happy to continue paying for their convenience. I appreciate all the advise on ways to record from broadcast, etc., but if anyone spots a way to simply do a quick download, please post. Thanks.
posted by rabbus at 8:00 AM on August 9, 2005