I listen to NPR off-and-on throughout the day. But I rarely listen to live radio — it almost entirely comes from podcasts that I download with iTunes. I want to listen to what I want, when I want, and be able to re-arrange the order of upcoming shows in any arbitrary order I please. But the two main daily shows that I’d like to listen to, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, don’t offer podcasts. I could play the shows directly from npr.org, but then I obviously can’t listen on my iPod, and have less control over how I use it.
So I did some searching and a do-it-yourself approach is far easier than I’d imagined thanks mainly to an open source program called streamripper. Binaries are available for Mac, Linux and Windows. It’s a command line program, so you have to give it some parameters and set it to a schedule, so I can record Morning Edition from my local affiliate, KUOW, by running this command at 5 a.m. each weekday:
streamripper http://128.208.34.80:8002/ -a morning_edition.mp3 -s -d /data -l 7200
To write id3 metadata tags to our new file (used by mp3 players like iTunes), I downloaded id3v2 and gave it the following command:
id3v2 -a “NPR” -t “Morning Edition” -y `date +%Y` -g “Podcast” morning_edition.mp3
I wrapped these commands in a shell script to make it more generic. It saves each show as a separate file such as “Morning_Edition_2007-12-14.mp3”. This will work on the Mac/Linux, but a similar .bat file will need to be created for a Windows environment.
#!/bin/sh# Config variables
MINUTES=120
ARTIST=”NPR”
DESC=”Morning Edition”
DIR=”/data/podcasts”
GENRE=”Podcast”
SRC=”http://128.208.34.80:8002/”# Script starts here
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
STUB=`echo “$DESC” | awk ‘{gsub(/\ /,”_”);print}’`
FILENAME=$DATE\_$STUB.mp3
/usr/bin/streamripper $SRC -a $FILENAME -s -d $DIR -l `expr $MINUTES \* 60` -r —quiet
/usr/bin/id3v2 -a “$ARTIST” -t “$DESC” -y `date +%Y` -g “$GENRE” $DIR/$FILENAME
I named the script “morningedition.sh” and put it in my crontab to fire up weekdays at 5a.m.:
0 5 * * 1,2,3,4,5 ~/morningedition.sh
And voilà, I have my podcast. Pair this with other media sources and you can record any NPR show you like.
I was planning on upgrading my Macbook to Leopard in the next month or two with the assumption that all of my essential applications would run fine. I mean, with the Universal PR that Apple has put out over the last couple years, I didn’t think it would be an issue. Then I happened across this notice from Adobe, which says that the Photoshop CS 2 that I bought a year ago won’t be supported with Leopard, and I’ll have to pay $599 to upgrade it.
Q. Will older versions of Adobe creative software—such as Creative Suite 2 and Macromedia Studio 8 software—support Mac OS X Leopard? A. While older Adobe applications may install and run on Mac OS X Leopard, they were designed, tested, and released to the public several years before this new operating system became available. You may, therefore, experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution. Older versions of our creative software will not be updated to support Mac OS X Leopard.
Adobe CS3 was released on April 17, 2007, so if you bought CS2 in early 2007, it’s now already out of date a mere 8 months later. I’m not sure who to be more angry with — Adobe or Apple. I can see Adobe’s motivations, however ill-intended they may be, of trying to get users to upgrade. The amount of work required to release a patch would be minimal since Leopard is not drastically different than Tiger. So this must be a marketing decision, since most people have little need to upgrade an already stable, mature platform. But I’m stunned that Apple didn’t work out an agreement with Adobe to support this, or fix whatever the problem seems to be on the OS side. Isn’t poor support of older hardware and software the main problem facing Windows with Vista upgrades?