Chris Nelms

I have been a fan of BBC Radio for many years, particularly Radio 4.  They seem to churn out an endless supply of high-quality documentaries, plays, comedies, quizzes, discussion programmes, and much else.  Since I spend about 3 hours a day in the car commuting to and from work I have plenty of opportunity to listen to the radio.

The advent of the Listen Again facility on the BBC Radio websites has transformed my life.  Now I can capture programmes during the week in which they were broadcast, and listen to them on my MP3 player at a time that is convenient for me.  Many people grumble about the TV licence fee we have to pay that funds the BBC (it’s currently £131.50 per year) but at least I now believe I am getting good value for my money.  I’m not clear what the strict legal position is regarding downloading and saving radio programmes for later listening, but since these are purely for my own use and I don’t share or resell these files I can’t believe I am committing any breach of copyright.

I have been asked by a few friends and work colleagues how I capture the programmes that are streamed in Real Audio format from the BBC Radio websites, so I thought I’d try briefly to describe my method here.  It is laborious, and has become quite a chore since I save 30 or 40 programmes a week.  The BBC has started to make certain programmes available as a ‘podcast’ or MP3 download and I’m ignoring these because my objective is to be able to download any radio programme and save it as an MP3 file.

1. The most important tool for this is the ‘RealAudio to WAV converter’.  This is a freeware program that can be downloaded from www.rawavrecorder.homestead.com/.  The description of freeware means that it can be downloaded and used for personal, non-commercial purposes, without payment of any licence fee.  The program looks home-made, is described as a beta, and has a few rough edges.  I did send an email to the author suggesting a few improvements and offering to make a payment but I didn’t receive any reply.  Nevertheless it works so download it and unzip the contents and copy them to somewhere convenient on your computer.  Do it now before the site suddenly disappears.
2. You need to find the URL on the BBC’s web server of the file you wish to download.  This can be tricky because the BBC use two different techniques to describe programme downloads on their web pages.  I’ll try to describe them both:
   • Some pages include a hyperlink directly to a specific .RAM file on their server.  As an example the page about Iran (www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/iran/) has a link like this.  The section entitled Sir John Tusa on Uncovering Iran has a link to a .RAM file.  In this case you can right-click on the link and select Copy shortcut from the pop-up context menu.
   • Most programmes do not have a link like this.  Instead the link takes you to a new browser window entitled the BBC Radio Player.  This has control buttons to play, pause, and fast-forward the audio stream rather like a tape or CD player.  The programme usually starts playing as soon as the window opens.  In this case you need to right-click on a blank part of the Player window and choose View Source from the pop-up context menu.  This should display the HTML source for that web page in a text editor (Windows Notepad on my computer).  A few lines from the top (usually about 12) will be the declaration of a JavaScript variable called Audiostream.  Don’t worry if you don’t understand JavaScript, you don’t need to.  You are looking for a line like this: var AudioStream = “/radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio4/lennyandwill”;  You need to copy the text between the quotation marks (i.e. in this case it will be /radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio4/lennyandwill).
   • In the event that neither of these methods yields the path to the .RAM file, search the source for .RAM and you should find a link to the relevant file (e.g. /radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio4/archomnibus.ram).
3. Run the RealAudio to WAV Recorder programme you downloaded in step 1.  Click on the Options menu and choose Configurations… to bring up the options box.  Make sure that the Record option is selected, and in the Destination Path box enter the path of the folder on your computer where you want to save the recording (e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\Chris\Desktop), then click the OK button to save your settings.
4. Having got a URL (or part of a URL) from step 2, paste this into the Location box.
5. If the URL starts with a slash (/) character, prepend it with www.bbc.co.uk at the beginning of the Location box.
6. If the URL doesn’t end in .RAM append .RAM to the end of the location box.  Like all URLs this is case-insensitive so it doesn’t matter if you use upper- or lower-case letters.  You should now have a string of text in the location box something like this: www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio4/lennyandwill.ram. 
7. Hit the Enter key and your download will start.  It records in real-time so that a 30 minute programme takes 30 minutes to download.  The programme will be saved as a .WAV file.
8. When the programme has been saved on your computer, use one of the many freeware audio file converters to convert the .WAV file to .MP3 format.  I use the Free CD to MP3 Converter (http://www.eusing.com/).

Now you will have an MP3 file of the radio programme that you can copy to your MP3 player to enjoy at your leisure!