Chris Nelms

I have written twice before (on 21st February 2009 and 24th December 2006) about downloading BBC Radio programmes as MP3 files so that they can be saved for personal listening at a later date. The trouble is, the Beeb keep changing the way their Listen Again service works so the methods I described no longer work all the time. Even since my post of a month ago the source code of the iPlayer has been amended for some programmes so that we cannot see the name of the .RAM file to download. The method described below works but it is tedious to obtain the required download link. The only good news on this is that the link is static for regular programmes (at least until the BBC changes something) so I can load the links into Audio Hijack Pro on my iMac for example and it will download several Radio 4 programmes automatically week after week without further intervention.

The first step of this process is to obtain a copy of WGET, a command-line application that is freely available in versions for Windows, Mac OS/X, and Linux. WGET downloads files from web servers using either the http, https, or ftp protocols. You don’t understand what that means? Don’t worry, you don’t need to. Just use a search engine to search for ‘wget download’ or similar and make sure you’re downloading the version for your chosen operating system. If you want to learn more about wget www.gnu.org/software/wget/ is a good starting point. Having downloaded WGET, install it on your computer.

Now, we need to find the name of the .RAM file to download (RAM is a Real Audio Metafile that contains the information RealPlayer needs to receive streaming audio). For some programmes this can be retrieved from the source of the BBC iPlayer as I described on 21st February 2009. For example the full URL of last Monday’s Afternoon Play is:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/aod/playlists/vp/vt/h0/0b/RadioBridge_uk_1415_bbc_radio_fourfm.ram

However increasingly this information appears to be missing from the iPlayer source I look at. In that case you need to find the 8-character PID from the iPlayer Real Converter website. This website makes it easy to find the PID for the programme you want. Remember that the PID is reversed in the URL so the PID of Monday’s Afternoon Play in the link above is b00htvpv. Note also the time of the broadcast (in 24 hour format - e.g. 1415 for 2.15pm) and the name of the BBC radio station (e.g. radio_fourfm, bbc_7, radio_three, etc).

Having got the PID we can form a URL by substituting the three pieces of information shown here in blue:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/aod/playlists/vp/vt/h0/0b/RadioBridge_uk_1415_bbc_radio_fourfm.ram

Open a command prompt (in Windows run cmd or on a Mac run terminal.app). At the prompt enter wget followed by a space and the URL you’ve just constructed. For example:

wget http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/aod/playlists/vp/vt/h0/0b/RadioBridge_uk_1415_bbc_radio_fourfm.ram

and hit the Return key. Within a second or so WGET will download the file that contains the real URL of the program you want. In the case of this example the file is named RadioBridge_uk_1415_bbc_radio_fourfm.ram and is just 189 bytes in size. Open that file using a text editor (e.g. Windows Notepad or OS/X TextEdit), not using RealPlayer which will probably be the default application for a file of that type. You will see, as shown here, that the file contains the real URL of the Real Audio stream using the rtsp (Real Time Streaming Protocol).

Copy the first part of that URL (up to, but not including, the first ?). In the case of our example it would be:

rtsp://rm-acl.bbc.co.uk:554/radio4fmcoyopa/radio_4_fm_-_monday_1415.ra

This is the link that we can paste into RealPlayer, or Audio Hijack Pro, or whatever application we have to download the programme and save it as an MP3 file. Note that this link is not specific to a particular episode of the programme. It will work for next Monday’s Afternoon Play and the one after that. In this case since Afternoon Plays are broadcast on every weekday I can download Tuesday’s Afternoon Play merely by changing monday to tuesday in this URL. Note also that if I also wished to download for example the comedy quiz Just A Minute, which is broadcast at 1830 on Mondays, I can just amend the time in this URL like this:

rtsp://rm-acl.bbc.co.uk:554/radio4fmcoyopa/radio_4_fm_-_monday_1830.ra

So there we are. A seemingly complicated method for finding a programme’s URL but once you understand the process it isn’t that difficult to set up several downloads.