Dan Misener dot com

from Dan Misener

How to download old This American Life episodes as MP3s

with 6 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.

Written by dmisener

August 1st, 2008 at 6:54 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with

6 Responses to 'How to download old This American Life episodes as MP3s'

Subscribe to comments with RSS

  1. I just subscribe to the podcast.

    Done. And done.

    bz

    1 Aug 08 at 8:53 am

  2. 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

    Dan Misener

    1 Aug 08 at 4:35 pm

  3. Thank you!

    Lindsey

    10 Sep 08 at 12:29 pm

  4. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH THAT URL!!!!!!!!!!!

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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

    anton

    6 Oct 08 at 9:32 pm

  5. But how do I save it to the computer?

    lacie

    9 Nov 08 at 9:38 pm

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

    dmisener

    10 Nov 08 at 8:06 am

Leave a Reply