How to download old This American Life episodes as MP3s

Posted: August 1st, 2008 | Author: Dan Misener | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: | 14 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.

And 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.

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

  1. 1 bz said at 8:53 am on August 1st, 2008:

    I just subscribe to the podcast.

    Done. And done.

  2. 2 Dan Misener said at 4:35 pm 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. 3 Lindsey said at 12:29 pm on September 10th, 2008:

    Thank you!

  4. 4 anton said at 9:32 pm on October 6th, 2008:

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

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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

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

    But how do I save it to the computer?

  6. 6 dmisener said at 8:06 am on November 10th, 2008:

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

  7. 7 devilindeatil said at 12:26 pm 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. 8 Jessica said at 3:51 pm 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. 9 Charlotte said at 10:27 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. 10 Dan Misener said at 6:30 pm on October 15th, 2009:

    Still works for me. For example: http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/350.mp3

  11. 11 ts said at 3:07 pm on May 2nd, 2010:

    something like this?

    http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/405.mp3

  12. 12 computerhead said at 7:47 pm on June 11th, 2010:

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

  13. 13 Cee said at 4:43 pm 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. 14 Dan Misener said at 4:55 pm 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.

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