News

BBC Radio in Radio Downloader Outside of the UK

I’ve recently become aware that most recently broadcast BBC Radio Programmes do not have either Real Audio or MP3 streams available for international users. This means that Radio Downloader is unable to download these programmes outside of the UK.

I’m currently working on a solution, and I hope to release an updated version which will fix the problems for international users in the next few weeks. This issue doesn’t affect UK based users.

Radio Downloader 0.8.4

I have just released version 0.8.4 of Radio Downloader. This is the second bugfix release in the 0.8 series, and does not include any new features.

The fixes in this release allow the most commonly reported MP3 download errors to display informative error messages. For full details, check out the changelog.

Issue 66 added to 8BS Online Conversion

I’ve just updated the 8-Bit Software Magazine Online Conversion to include Issue 66. I have also tweaked the navigation to be clearer and enable navigating from an item to its parent magazine instead of just up to the index.

Radio Downloader 0.8.2

Today I have released version 0.8.2 of Radio Downloader. This is a bugfix release, and does not include any new features.

Most of the fixes relate to direct MP3 downloads, but there is also a fix for a crash caused by a missing My Documents folder. For full details, check out the changelog.

Issue 65 added to 8BS Online Conversion

I’ve just updated the 8-Bit Software Magazine Online Conversion to include Issue 65. Another update is a fix for the mapping of fraction characters and pipes in the converted Mode 7 pages.

Radio Downloader and Windows 7

With the release of version 0.8 yesterday, I have added Windows 7 as a supported operating system for Radio Downloader. I’ve also dropped support for Windows 2000 - this doesn’t mean that I will block it from working on 2000, but I won’t be routinely testing it on that OS from now on.

Radio Downloader works fine on Windows 7, but due to the updated behaviour of the system tray, the icon for Radio Downloader is not displayed when the main window is closed. A workaround for this is to right-click on the Radio Downloader icon in the taskbar when the main window is open and choose ‘Pin this program to taskbar’. This will then keep the Radio Downloader icon on the taskbar when the window is closed, and can be used to re-open the window.

I’ve raised a number of bugs for improving integration with Windows 7 and the new taskbar, and I hope to address these over the next few releases.

Radio Downloader 0.8

I’m pleased to announce the release of Radio Downloader 0.8. The main feature added with this release is that BBC Radio programmes are directly downloaded as MP3 instead of Real Audio. This requires far less CPU power, and is able to download BBC Local and Nations Radio programmes again.

The direct MP3 download does not currently support re-encoding the downloaded MP3 files to other bitrates and frequencies, so I have added a setting in the BBC Provider options to disable the direct download option for users who require this.

This release also brings a small number of other bug fixes and enhancements, which you can find in the changelog.

BBC Real Audio Streams

Just a quick update about Radio Downloader - the BBC have made a blog posting about their plans to phase out the Real Audio streams that they generate for their radio programmes (which Radio Downloader uses to download and convert).

As I noted previously, they have already done this for local (and nations) radio, and have said that they will phase them out for national radio by the 30th of March 2010.

However, my implementation of an alternative method of downloading is progressing well, and I hope to start testing a new version of Radio Downloader containing this in the next couple of weeks.

Radio Downloader and BBC Local Radio

There currently seems to be a problem with Radio Downloader downloading episodes of BBC Local Radio programmes. This appears to be caused by the BBC not generating the Real Audio stream that Radio Downloader downloads and converts any more. I don’t know if this is temporary, or a permanent change.

I’ll be looking at alternative ways to access this content, but this may take some time to implement so I can’t give a timescale at present.

Radio Downloader 0.6

Today I have released a new version of Radio Downloader. This resolves an issue with available episodes for a limited number of BBC programmes not being found, as well as fixing the most commonly reported error encountered when downloading programmes.

This release also adds the ability to use sub-folders in the downloaded programme file name template, and a number of other fixes and enhancements, which you can find in the changelog.

Please Note: There is a data loss bug in older versions of Radio Downloader, which causes the program database to become corrupted when updating between versions. This is fixed in version 0.6, but reverting to an older release of Radio Downloader (which is normally something that I would advise against) will cause your database to become permanently corrupted!