Hi Steve -

Their / his / her (?) web page does look sick, doesn't i?

I was also a fan of Radio Ben's work.  Exchanged e-mails with him / her a
few years back.  I checked things a few months ago and found that several
of the links weren't working and hadn't been updated -- for instance, All
India Radio's General Overseas Service in English, which no longer exists.

I share your interest in making audio programming available in RSS form, as
I also agree that this would help get this programming in front of a wider
audience.

I keep a spreadsheet of URLs that I use as a personal reference, that could
stream the audio at specific times; I run a Linux desktop so I use a
crontab file to record what I want.  I generally save out the audio as MP3
(even if it's streamed in AAC) because that behaves better interacting with
my navigating apps on my smartphone.  I have written scripts to handle
MPEG-DASH and HLS streams using FFMPEG, as well; I tend to capture it live.

But I would have to figure out how to turn those audio files into RSS
formatted listings.

I did the work for TRT (Turkey) and Radio Thailand (domestic and
international services), two services that don't specifically offer
RSS-formatted audio.

I also did the work to capture DW TV and NHK TV video as MP3 audio, again
using FFMPEG.  Those weren't too difficult because their streams are HLS
and their URLs are reasonably static.

France24 is a challenge because they use youtube; my experience is that the
URL character string seems to change frequently (daily?) just because it
can... but again I bet someone with scripting experience could do it.

Haven't bothered with too many others because they weren't on my radar.

Contact me off-line to discuss...I might not respond immediately but this
is an area of interest.

Richard Cuff

On Sun, Jul 21, 2024 at 1:29 PM Steven Clift <[email protected]>
wrote:

> It appears that RadioBen is offline. Can anyone confirm if that's
> permanent?
>
> It automatically monitored the live stream of a small countries external
> service (that may or may not be broadcast on SW anymore) and recorded shows
> into MP3 files and shared them with the world via a podcast rss feed.
>
> Fwiw, there are dozens of countries that haven't figured out how to
> resource or technically implement efforts to make their programs available
> on-demand. There are a few countries that put shows on the web but haven't
> bothered to add a podcast feed to reach people via iTunes, Spotify, YouTube
> podcasts, etc.
>
> I remain a fan of surfacing such daily or weekly programs in English via
> my 1 Radio News app on-demand.
>
> A dozen programs found their way into my app because of RadioBen from
> Voice of Nigeria to Algeria to others.
>
> Anyway, as governments continue to close radio services in deference to
> video-based external services, I figure getting the existing multilingual
> audio programming into the podcast ecology would be a strategic.
>
> Is anyone else out there working on this or interested in this?
>
> I can help bring listeners if others can get the audio into podcast feeds..
>
> Thanks,
> Steve
>
>
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