How to download old This American Life episodes as MP3s
Posted: August 1st, 2008 | Author: Dan Misener | Filed under: Radio | Tags: download, ira glass, podcasts, Radio, tal, this american life, wbez | 25 Comments »Once upon a time, you could download old episodes of This American Life by grabbing MP3 file locations from the M3U files posted on their website. The MP3 files lived here:
http://audio.wbez.org/tal/SHOWNUMBER.mp3
But that stopped working.
These days, though you can still listen to TAL archives, downloading them has become a bit trickier because the shows are hidden behind a flash player. But, that flash player is still pointing to an actual downloadable MP3, and Christopher Soghoian has figured out where they live:
http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/SHOWNUMBER.mp3
Come on… that directory structure is pretty hilarious.
Replace SHOWNUMBER with the episode number (338 for example), and you’re good to go.
If you download and enjoy This American Life, you really should donate.
I just subscribe to the podcast.
Done. And done.
Buzz,
Absolutely, subscribing to the podcast works. But the podcast only contains the most recent episode. So if you're looking for an old episode, you're out of luck.
-dan
Thank you!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH THAT URL!!!!!!!!!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
also how did you get it out of the flash player, do tell
But how do I save it to the computer?
@lacie — in Firefox, File -> Save Page As…
totally awesome, thanks for the help, i'd give all the money i had to mr glass, unfortunately…i dont have any?
Awesome! I was going crazy trying to figure out how I could get old episodes and cut out single acts to create a mix CD, and I'm so frustrated that legally buying the episodes did NOT allow me to do this. Just goes to show that DRM can PREVENT you from paying for content you'd gladly give money for.
I'm pretty much dying right now because that way of listening to the mp3s no longer works. RIP jomamashouse/ismymamashouse!!
Still works for me. For example: http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/is…
something like this?
http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/is…
still working. just got the one about the beaver trilogy. Love that one.
Bad news – was working fine until this afternoon when all of a sudden it wouldnt work (have been dowloading them on my Blackberry). Just logged on to do it on laptop and it brings up quicktime player, so it seems you can listen to old shows, but you can't save them to your PC. (well, you can, but not directly).
Shame. I was just downloading them to listen to a few on holiday.
Still works fine for me. When Quicktime shows up, File -> Save Page As… in Firefox for Mac. I suspect other browsers would work similarly.
CURRENT: OCTOBER 2010 !
Here's a way to get a bunch of episodes with one command. You need Linux or a Mac. Sorry windows. I downloaded 44 episodes like this today.
for i in {100..416};do wget http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcast.t…
note: I don't know the numbering scheme below 100, try to figure it out. 416 is their latest episode. Get 'em before they change it up. Your welcome and enjoy.
the above command got cut, for full command go here and scroll scroll to bottom page: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2007/06/takedown-resi…
! I think the reason people keep thinking that the link does not work is because TAL occasionally airs re-runs which are part of an older numbering system.
I experienced this problem when i started listening to shows in advance! Yes that is right, you could be listening to next weeks show, now! This is the link that the flash stream player uses:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/all/play_mu…
This is the link for this week's episode, "Toxi" which you can currently only hear on the radio until Sunday at 7PM. It is actually a weak discovery being that usually you can only listen to a podcast 5 days in advance, but that is 5 days before anyone else! For example if I try using this link with next week's show, episode 419, it doesn't play; they must still be putting those final touches on it.
neither itunes nor this Christopher Soghoian can be opened in China~then what can i do ?
and i suddenly realized how to do immediately after i finished the question!
thanks a lot
yup, still works like a charm
oh boy! the very first episode even (when it was apparently called "Your Radio Playhouse") http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/is…
Clever, effective but darn labour intensive. I am now on episode 6.
Should be done the full 456 by… June?
I suggest learning how to use wget or curl. You’ll find these much less labour-intensive.
Is there anyway to batch download, that is to say, queue up the 456 unique URLs, each with it's own episode number and hit GO!
Hmmm, this looks promising:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ba…
I'll report on how it works.
DownThemAll might be handy:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall/
Or, of course, you could learn how to use wget or curl.
I couldn’t figure out DownThemAll.
but Flashget just ripped through episodes 3 to 9 in a blink and has a nifty URL wildcard propagation feature. My lifetime supply of TAL is on the horizon.