Posted: January 18th, 2012 | Author: Dan Misener | Filed under: Podcasting, Software | Tags: instacast, iOS, iphone, podcasts | 2 Comments »I love podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts. And almost exclusively, I use my iPhone to listen to podcasts.
But heres’s the thing: subscribing to and downloading new podcasts to my iPhone is fiddly. Syncing with iTunes on my Mac is fiddly. Downloading new episodes a-la-carte via the iTunes app on iOS is fiddly.
Which is why I was absolutely delighted to learn about Instacast. It’s a standalone podcast downloader and player for iOS, and it’s exactly what the iPhone’s built-in should have been. I wish I’d known about it sooner. Here’s a video:
Introduction to Instacast from Vemedio on Vimeo.
If you listen to or download podcasts regularly, and aren’t satisfied with iTunes, Instacast is well worth the $1.99 asking price.
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.