It's great to see NPR making shows available as podcasts. But some of my favorites, like Fresh Air, aren't offered in that format. Even if they were, RSS feeds look to the future whereas many of the shows I'd like to hear have already aired and are stored in the archive. I can stream these shows, but I can't easily shift them to a portable player and listen while jogging, walking, or driving -- the only big chunks of time I have available for listening.
In today's embedded 3-minute screencast I demonstrate the method I use to shift streaming audio to MP3. It's a Rube Goldberg contraption involving mplayer and lame along with Python and shell scripts:
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converting audio streams to mp3
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As I explain in the screencast, it's my belief that shifting these programs from streams to MP3 files, for my own personal and non-commercial purposes, is a fair use. But I'd be curious to know the opinions of copyright lawyers, broadcasters, and other public radio listeners.
Incidentally, if you appreciate the work that Terry Gross has done over the past 30 years, as I do, you might like to know that there's an effort underway to preserve the earliest shows which are on deteriorating reel-to-reel tapes.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/12/14.html#a1354