Taking BaL podcasts/episodes abroad - advice needed

[Hitch]

ucanseetheend Sorry to hear that. Podcast Addict has been very reliable for me. Your problem might be caused by the episodes' URL addresses having changed. I think there is an "Errors" tab somewhere in the app that might give more information. It's so frustrating when supposedly efficient technology doesn't work as promised.

Re. the disappearance of card slots: the anti-social practice of mobile phones blaring away on public transport is partly due to the absence of headphone jacks. Phones seem to be getting less convenient.

[Retune]

Hello,
new to this forum, but stumbled across it and it looks great. I'm going abroad for a year (Pakistan) and would love to take some BaL with me (pretty much what's available on the website.) I cant access BBC there and it's completey blocked on the limited internet access. I be staying in a rural village with no reasonable internet connection. I plan to take my phone and a terabyte of music. Anyone know what the best way I can do this? Are the podcasts downloadable in a recognised audio format, or must they be played and captured using audio software. I'm a complete tech idiot, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

There are various ways to do this - it depends on whether you want to download directly to a phone (assuming you have enough space) or download via a computer and store the episodes on your hard disk.

If you have an Android phone, one app you can use is AntennaPod:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.danoeh.antennapod

https://antennapod.org/

Once you've searched for and selected the BBC Record Review podcast from within the app, long press on an episode and choose the 'Multi select' option. This allows you to choose a selection or all of the available podcasts (all episodes take up more than 25GB!). Select the blue icon that pops up and choose 'Download'.

Alternatively, various applications allow you to download to a computer. One I've used is gPodder, which runs on Windows, Mac or Linux:

https://gpodder.github.io/

Once you've installed it, go to the gPodder->Preferences menu and select 'Updating'. Change the 'Maximum number of episodes per podcast' from the default 200 to (say) 1000 (there are currently more than 600 episodes of BaL online).

You then need to tell gPodder where to find the Record Review BaL podcast. You can either use the search function to find Record Review (Subscriptions->Discover new podcasts) or enter the address directly (Subscriptions->Add podcast via URL). To do the latter, you need the Record Review RSS feed address, which is:

https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nrtty.rss

You should then get a download popup box, where you can select some or all episodes. Downloads are in mp3 format. The files end up here:

https://gpodder.github.io/docs/user-manual.html#gpodder-home-folder-and-download-location

Incidentally, I found the RSS feed by looking at the main BBC Record Review podcast address:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrtty/episodes/downloads

and deriving the RSS feed from it as explained here:

https://sijobling.com/tips/bbc-sounds-podcast-rss-feeds/

This should work for other BBC podcasts.

[Retune]

Re. the disappearance of card slots: the anti-social practice of mobile phones blaring away on public transport is partly due to the absence of headphone jacks. Phones seem to be getting less convenient.

I'm with Count Binface on this one - a ban with offenders punished by being forced to watch a box set of the One Show! And yes, it's really irritating not to have the socket. Now I always have to carry (and remember to charge) wireless headphones. FM radios in phones disappeared around the same time, partly because the headphone cable acted as the antenna. Also missed is the incredibly useful micro trackball my first Android phone had, which was much better for moving the cursor when editing text than the touchscreen. Not to mention removable batteries (because of course they just want you to buy a new phone when the battery dies). And do phones really need glass backs, which is just something else to crack? But the loss of the card slot is the worst downgrade.

[richardfinegold]

It's a shame that just when large capacity media cards have become readily affordable, the phone makers are less interested in providing slots for them. I suppose they want to upsell us on their models with more onboard storage (always much more expensive per GB than a card), and some of them have cloud services they want us to rent. Yes, external storage gadgets are small and cheap, but nothing is as convenient as only having to carry your phone, especially on a long trip.

Exactly

[akiralx]

If you have an iPhone simply add it to iTunes (Apple Music) like any other music track by navigating to the mp3 file on your computer, then sync it to your iPhone in the usual way.