How to download old This American Life episodes as MP3s

Posted: August 1st, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Radio | Tags: , , , , , , | 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.


25 Comments on “How to download old This American Life episodes as MP3s”

  1. 1bz said at 3:53 am on August 1st, 2008:

    I just subscribe to the podcast.

    Done. And done.

  2. 2Dan Misener said at 11:35 am on August 1st, 2008:

    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

  3. 3Lindsey said at 7:29 am on September 10th, 2008:

    Thank you!

  4. 4anton said at 4:32 pm on October 6th, 2008:

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH THAT URL!!!!!!!!!!!

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

    also how did you get it out of the flash player, do tell

  5. 5lacie said at 4:38 pm on November 9th, 2008:

    But how do I save it to the computer?

  6. 6dmisener said at 3:06 am on November 10th, 2008:

    @lacie — in Firefox, File -> Save Page As…

  7. 7devilindeatil said at 7:26 am on May 13th, 2009:

    totally awesome, thanks for the help, i'd give all the money i had to mr glass, unfortunately…i dont have any?

  8. 8Jessica said at 10:51 am on June 8th, 2009:

    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.

  9. 9Charlotte said at 5:27 pm on October 13th, 2009:

    I'm pretty much dying right now because that way of listening to the mp3s no longer works. RIP jomamashouse/ismymamashouse!!

  10. 10Dan Misener said at 1:30 pm on October 15th, 2009:

    Still works for me. For example: http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/is…

  11. 11ts said at 10:07 am on May 2nd, 2010:

    something like this?

    http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/is…

  12. 12computerhead said at 2:47 pm on June 11th, 2010:

    still working. just got the one about the beaver trilogy. Love that one.

  13. 13Cee said at 11:43 am on July 29th, 2010:

    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.

  14. 14Dan Misener said at 11:55 am on July 29th, 2010:

    Still works fine for me. When Quicktime shows up, File -> Save Page As… in Firefox for Mac. I suspect other browsers would work similarly.

  15. 15anon said at 7:46 pm on October 21st, 2010:

    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.

  16. 16anon said at 4:15 am on October 24th, 2010:

    the above command got cut, for full command go here and scroll scroll to bottom page: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2007/06/takedown-resi…

  17. 17Daniel said at 4:14 am on November 7th, 2010:

    ! 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.

  18. 18Anita said at 4:30 am on December 17th, 2010:

    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

  19. 19nolo said at 8:47 pm on August 3rd, 2011:

    yup, still works like a charm

  20. 20megawatson said at 1:55 pm on November 14th, 2011:

    oh boy! the very first episode even (when it was apparently called "Your Radio Playhouse") http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/is…

  21. 21peter said at 11:32 am on January 28th, 2012:

    Clever, effective but darn labour intensive. I am now on episode 6.
    Should be done the full 456 by… June?

  22. 22Dan Misener said at 11:35 am on January 28th, 2012:

    I suggest learning how to use wget or curl. You’ll find these much less labour-intensive.

  23. 23peter said at 11:42 am on January 28th, 2012:

    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.

  24. 24Dan Misener said at 11:50 am on January 28th, 2012:

    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.

  25. 25peter said at 2:04 pm on January 28th, 2012:

    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.


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