This American Life Availible as MP3
I mentioned it when they announced that it was coming, but as of yesterday, This American Life is available in MP3 format as well as the commercial Audible format and the streaming RealAudio.
Given that I don't use the bandwidth on client site or at work for music streaming (I'd prefer to use my personal bandwidth for stuff like this), I've been left with either just listening at home at the computer or hacks like recording them. I did do a bit of the recording for a while. However, since that takes an hour per episode, it's really labor intensive. So, I was really happy to see the announcement and even happier to see them show up.
They're labeling it as "MP3 streaming" as opposed to downloads. However, MP3 "streaming" is just a remote playlist and remote MP3 that "streaming" clients stream. Most of the stream "recorders" just save that bytestream, but you can just open the .m3u in a text editor and you will see the URL to the real MP3
The format of the actual MP3 links is:
http://audio.wbez.org/tal/SHOWNUMBER.mp3
Thus, you can pretty straightforwardly grab pretty much all of the available episodes (currently 311).
Do make sure that if you, for example, decide to download all 300+ episodes for your own personal archive, that you pace yourself and stretch it out over a couple of weeks.
April 18th, 2006 at 6:51 am
Incidentally, should someone want to do something as hypothetical as grab all of them in reverse order with a 10 minute wait in between each request, the following PHP code might prove useful. Hypothetically.
for ($i=311;$i>=1;$i–){
$url = "http://audio.wbez.org/tal/$i.mp3";
exec("wget $url");
sleep(600);
}
April 20th, 2006 at 8:50 am
Here's an Unofficial This American Life MP3 podcast I've thrown together: http://redjar.org/radio/tal/archive/
April 23rd, 2006 at 5:59 am
I have looked through a bunch of websites on how to just grab the mp3 files and haven't been able to find an easy way. The way that looks good is to get wget and use borland free compiler to compile and then run. I have never used the borland complier. Is this easy? Is there a simpler way to get these files?
April 25th, 2006 at 10:08 pm
This is incredible man. thanks so much for posting it. I have been converting old episodes with a prog called Switch Plus (up until they switched from .ram to .m3u) so this is great.
April 25th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Just a very minor change to the above script. This will grab the MP3's using Coral Cache. This will reduce TAL's bandwidth consumption:
for ($i=311;$i>=1;$i–){
$url = “http://audio.wbez.org.nyud.net:8080/tal/$i.mp3″;
exec(â€wget $urlâ€);
sleep(600);
}
April 26th, 2006 at 7:44 am
for the technically savvy who want to download all the eps, like I did last night, download curl here
http://curl.haxx.se/
then make a batch file like this:
@ECHO Off
SET COUNT=221
:Loop
echo downloading
echo
e:\progra~1\curl\curl.exe -o tal-%COUNT%.mp3 http://audio.wbez.org/tal/%COUNT%.mp3
SET /A COUNT=COUNT+1
ECHO %COUNT%
goto Loop
It will keep trying to download episodes past where they actually end, but you can just stop it then.
April 29th, 2006 at 10:21 am
Holy shit, this is funny. You can even stream and download the future episodes before they have it up on the website… wow.
http://audio.wbez.org/tal/221.mp3 is this week. http://audio.wbez.org/tal/222.mp3 is, I assume, the next. I have gotten all the way up to 240…
April 30th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
They were already up to 311 when I originally posted and 312 doesn't work yet, so there's no mp3's from the future.
April 30th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Lol, mp3's from the future. Just great. Thanks again for the advice
May 3rd, 2006 at 4:29 am
Woah, this is just awesome! In 2000 I started recording episodes with my pc. Later I used streambox vcr to download shows from their website, but it stopped working after some time. Then last year I bought a 1-year Audible subscription to TAL. But I'm really not satisfied with the Audible sound quality. These mp3s are sooo much better! But now I'm in a dilemma, my subscription is about to expire… should I renew it and additionally download the mp3s? I think that would be the moral thing to do.
May 5th, 2006 at 7:49 am
Looks like they may have taken down the mp3's. Too much demand, maybe?
May 5th, 2006 at 8:04 am
Where did you see that they were down? I just checked and they're still up.
May 5th, 2006 at 9:15 am
Maybe not. I just checked back again and the site seems to be responding again. It was probably on my end. It sure seems to have slowed down, though.
June 2nd, 2006 at 3:13 am
There had to be a way for us non-tech savvy denizens so I do the following:
(a) Write myself an email
(b) Within that same email I copy the link location of the TAL I'd like to hear
(c) I create a hyperlink of the same TAL, changing the .m3u to a .mp3.
(d) I send the email off, right click and save the link locations.
It is in this way that I was able to put every single episode of TAL on to 14 handsome compact discs, suitable for the gym, the car, some distribution here and there.
June 4th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
FYI, there are other previously unpublished shows from their past archives that are also available by putting in the right show number.
June 26th, 2006 at 8:46 am
Hi, the downloads have stopped working, they seem to have switched to a service called stream guys. I've been downloading all the episodes, and I'm up to 224. Is there anyway to get around this? Would someone be kind enough to send me the ones I'm missing(225-320)? I was going to make large zip files of the show that I could distribute to my friends.
Oh, and the new links look like this.
http://wbez-tal.streamguys.us/content/314.mp3
thanks!
-Nolan
June 27th, 2006 at 1:05 am
Yep, it stopped.I have everything from 210 to 313. Maybe you(Nolan) like to trade? I'll send you a DVD, and you send me one? email me at lfh5454(at) yahoo.com
June 29th, 2006 at 7:39 pm
Hey, would someone be willing to send me episode 253? I need it for a class I'm teaching. I can't get the streaming mp3's to fast forward and rewind with media player, meaning that I wouldn't be able to cue the file to the right segment for my class in a timely manner. you can send me the file through aim, tashigirl777. thanks! tasha
June 29th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
That shouldn't be a big problem, I know I have that episode around here somewhere. But are you certain you can't skip around? Once the entire episode has been loaded into you computer (which it does, even when streamining) you should be able to skip around at your leasure.
Let me know if this doesn't work for you.
And if you don't mind my asking, for what subject are you planning to use the episode? I would have gotten a great kick out of hearing the show from a teacher of mine.
June 30th, 2006 at 12:41 am
I was able to use StreamRipper (http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/) to download an mp3 file from the shoutcast stream, enjoy!
July 22nd, 2006 at 8:12 pm
I'm using StreamRipper but when I tell it to download it just downloads forever. I see that I can tell it to stop after a time period, but I'd rather just get "the episode".
Mike, could you share the parameters you are passing to StreamRipper?
July 31st, 2006 at 3:18 pm
By default, the Mac OS X version of streamripper is set to not overwrite existing files, so what happens is it downloads the show once, and keeps streaming, but doesnt touch the file you've already downloaded. You should be able to set streamripper to work the same on your system. Hope this helps.
July 31st, 2006 at 6:41 pm
I must be an idiot since I've tried a ton of different command line options and nothing gets me where I need to be. Can you post the exact command you were using?
August 12th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
Found this great fix: http://ldopa.net/2006/06/29/life-lifting/
It's working just fine for me, downloading the mp3s that are hosted at the streamguys url