I'm kind of with the Simpsons when it comes to Prairie Home Companion:
Garrison Keillor Turns Out the Lights on Lake Wobegon
51–53 of 53 posts
Re: Garrison Keillor Turns Out the Lights on Lake Wobegon
#52I grew up listening to Garrison Keillor and stories from Lake Wobegon. Listening to it as an adult, I have to say, it's not very good quality. I guess it's impossible to keep up a high level of quality week after week for so many years. But when I listen to it I hear a man rambling almost incoherently. There's not even a reasonable arc most weeks, he just babbles until time is up and Garrison abruptly says ".. and th…
For me, that's almost part of the charm. Each show doesn't itself need to be a masterpiece in order to play a part in the overall narrative of Lake Wobegon and Keillor's psyche. The show gained narrative force through its many years of accrual. EDIT: Spelling
Also, the stories and jokes _needed not_ be top-notch (even though the way GK brought them to life on the radio always was). They tell you about mediocre, often weird people quietly but merrily living their lives just the way they want to, thank you very much. Turns out surprisingly many listeners liked that. NFLW was a celebration of natural, unashamed, funny, sad, humane mediocrity. I only came to know the show about two years ago and will miss it for a long time to come.
Re: Garrison Keillor Turns Out the Lights on Lake Wobegon
#53It's long saddened me that you can't get Prairie Home Companion as a podcast: there's too many songs from too many authors so they don't even try to acquire the rights. Our copyright regime still needs to adapt to the modern world.
I came here to say this. For years I thought of setting up something to automatically record and catalog the shows, and sadly it's too late now. Has anyone found an online source for full archived shows? Surely someone somewhere has them saved...
http://prairiehome.org/shows/ has the archive, and it is kind of sucky to use their player when out on a road trip here on the prairie. I'm not on the same edge of the prairie as St. Paul, but the cellular network isn't exactly top notch on the roads I travel here in SE Indiana. So, I yank down the episodes that I miss the live broadcasts.
The APM player is open source.
https://github.com/APMG/APMPlayer
But no need to deep dive the source.
When you open a player page's source, you see a line like this:
var playables = [{"identifier":"apm_audio:\/phc\/2016\/07\/02\/phc_20160702_128.mp3"}];
Looks like the end of a URL, but what is the beginning? It isn't prairiehome.publicradio.org where the page is served from.
Opening the apmplayer-all.min.js, there is:
function(){var d={"apm-audio":{flash_server_url:"rtmp://ondemand-rtmp.stream.publicradio.org/music",flash_file_prefix:"mp3:ondemand",http_file_prefix:"http://ondemand-http.stream.publicradio.org",buffer_time:3,t...},"apm-live-audio"
You get the beginning of the URL for the file. Put two and two together, you get:
http://ondemand-http.stream.publicradio.org/phc/2016/07/02/p...
Now that we have the format and know that PHC is a weekly show, you could directly grab or make a bulk download script.
http://ondemand-http.stream.publicradio.org/phc/YYYY/MM/DD/p...
Note: the archive only has Sept 2012 onward - http://prairiehome.org/shows/2012/09/ Before that, episodes are Realplayer RAM files on the old archive page.