Recording Radio Plays

[Mike6567]

When driving across France on our holidays we listen to the podcasts of The Archers. The system works fine with an ipod plugged into the car system.
I would like to play other entertainment like the Afternoon Play but for some reason the BBC do not provide this as a podcast.
My question is - is there a simple system to record radio to a computer then ipod?

In the past we would record to a tape cassette and play this in the car but, without stating the obvious, there are no longer tape cassette recorders easily available and certainly no cassette players available in the car.

[le Pingouin]

Plug your tuner into the line-in socket of your computer and use something like the in-built Windows Sound Recorder or Audacity (it's free) to record.

Record audio with Sound Recorder

Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder

Audacity is far more capable - editing and saving to MP3 isn't hard.

[bnt]

I've done this with VLC too. Recording Radio 4 goes like this:

- Start VLC.
- Select menu Media, Convert/Save
- Select the Network tab.
- You will be asked for a "Network URL". For BBC, you can find the URL on BBC Radio iPhone Streams e.g. the Radio 4 URL is BBC Radio 4
- hit Convert/Save:
- under "Profile", select the output type. If you're going to edit the results, I recommend "Audio/CD", which saves an uncompressed (i.e. large) WAV file. If you're going to just play it back, you can just choose "Audio/MP3".
- choose the Destination file location and name e.g. Desktop then "radio4.mp3".

NB: if you're going to use Audacity to edit the audio, note that it can't export MP3 files unless you add an extra component: Audacity: How do I download and install the LAME MP3 encoder?

[Mike6567]

Thanks for all the ideas so far.
Still at R&D stage but I have just used the built in Sound Recorder (as suggested by le Pin..) to record a bit of a programme from yesterday.
I just burnt it to a CD and this worked OK on the car player.
Seems a bit too simple? Will continue the R&D

[xraydice]

Radio Downloader

Try this ,works for me

Radio Downloader

saves to a downloaded programs folder, I then drag and drop in to i tunes.

Xray

[vulcanised]

Before you save to mp3 make sure your car player accepts that format. A lot don't.

My car has a cassette player, if you're interested in an old Mondeo

[Dream Land]

Maybe not quite what you are after, but I use an application on my iPhone called TuneIn Radio, you're able to select music from all over the world and record as much as you want.

[mad_jock]

Tunein is cracking.

I use my Kindle fire for any radio recording with that tunin app.

Then just play it on the fire which has a I think quite remarkably good audio. I should state though I do have turboprop ears though. So it might be crap for normal people.

[Mike6567]

Just tried the xraydice system.
Radio Dowloader worked fine and then burnt to a CD for use in the car (or could always put on the ipod).
I think I will try this method for a while.
Thanks again for all the suggestions.

[Spitoon]

hidownload does the trick for me. Start it up, turn the sniffer on, select a 'Listen again' programme and it will save the file for you. Works for just about any media that you can receive on the computer.

BTW, if you're in the market for a radio app for an iSomething you might like Radio Cloud - simple....and just works.