Popular Podcasts

An article by Murièle Weber in NZZamSonntag (25-Mar-2018) aroused my interest in podcasts. Here I summarize podcasts related to stories, news and learning English and add some tipps to listening and download.

• This American Life. The stories take less than 60 minutes. Some stories are accompanied by a transcript. If you want to download say the story "306" you can go directly to the mp3 file: https://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/306.mp3
  and get the transcript from
  https://thisamericanlife.org/306/transcript
• Stuff You Should Know.
• Homecoming.
• Top 20 podcasts of 2017.
• BBC 6 Minute English. An excellent podcast from BBC to learn English. There is one 6-minutes-long lesson each weak accompanied by a transcript.

Here is a Python program to download BBC 6 Minute English. It can be adapted easily to download several BBC podcasts at once.

# Call downloadDate("180322")
# to download the podcast from 2018-03-22

import sys
import urllib.request
import datetime
from datetime import timedelta
import time
    

def downloadDate(d):
    baseAddress = "http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/features/6-minute-english/ep-"
    
    print("Downloading date " + d)
    address = baseAddress + d
    print("Address=" + address)
    f = urllib.request.urlopen(address)
    fileBytes = f.read()
    f.close()
    fileContent = fileBytes.decode("latin1")        
    ix = fileContent.find("Takeaways")
    
    # pdf:
    ix_end = fileContent.find(".pdf", ix)
    ix_start = fileContent.rfind("http", ix, ix_end)
    url = fileContent[ix_start : ix_end] + ".pdf"
    ix_start = fileContent.rfind("_", ix, ix_end)
    title = fileContent[ix_start : ix_end]
    downloadName = d + title  + ".pdf"
    downloadUrl(url, downloadName)
    time.sleep(5)
    
    # mp3:
    ix_end = fileContent.find(".mp3", ix)
    ix_start = fileContent.rfind("http", ix, ix_end)
    url = fileContent[ix_start : ix_end] + ".mp3"
    downloadName = d + title  + ".mp3"
    downloadUrl(url, downloadName)
    time.sleep(5)


def downloadUrl(url, downloadName):
    print("Downloading " + url)
    opener = urllib.request.URLopener()
    opener.retrieve(url, downloadName)

Favorite podcast apps:

• Apple Podcasts
• Overcast (for Apple devices)
• Spotify
• Google Play. I use this one on my Android phone to listen to BBC 6 minute English.
• Breaker
• Stitcher
• TuneIn
• RadioPublic
• Pandora

For learning English see also English with Lucy on Youtube

With so many interesting podcasts the only question remains: where to get the time to listen to them?

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