How to Listen to Air America Anytime Without Paying Extra

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I used to listen to Air America Radio all the time. Setting aside how depressed this made me, I have stopped over time listening to most of their live programs. They lost me a little at a time. When they gave Jerry Springer a show, they lost me a little. When they took Sam Seder off of mornings, they lost me a little. When Al Franken left to run for Senate, that was bad, but replacing him with Thom Hartmann brought me back a little. However, my favorite Air America host is Rachel Maddow. You may have seen Rachel on some of the cable talking head shows. She was on Countdown with Keith Obermann last night for example. Problem is, Rachel got moved quite a while ago to the 6 to 8 PM time slot, and I'm off having dinner with the family at that time. Of course it would be perfect if I could download a podcast of her show, and that option used to be available for free at Air America, but somewhere along the line the radio network decided as part of their nearly brain dead business plan to charge for that priviledge. To just download the Rachel Maddow Show would cost me $6.95 a month. For podcasts of every show, that would be $10.95 a month. Sorry. I have better uses for my small quantity of discretionary income.

As a conseqence, I decided to record the Rachel Maddow Show myself. This should be easy, but it wasn't. Here are the steps I took to make this work. They are Mac-centric, since I'm a mac geek from way back, but the principles should apply to PCs as well. You'll just have to find your own software.

Steps to Capturing the Rachel Maddow Show

(Easily applicable to other shows.)

1. Find yourself some audio capture software.
You need a piece of software that can capture audio from an Internet stream according to a schedule. I use Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba Software. Ironically, this software costs money, and I paid it, because I view it as an investment that I can leverage across multiple times that I might want to capture audio. It works quite well.

2. Find a working and stable Air America stream.
This turns out to be the most challenging step. Forget about the stream on the Air America web site. Whether purposely or by accident, the Air America stream is not stable enough to stay up for two hours without stalling. It's very frustrating to get up in the morning and go to listen to Rachel's show from the night before and find that you've only captured 10 minutes of audio.

The stream I've found which works quite well is the one for WWRL in New York. I've been using this for a while now and it's rock stable and carries all the Air America shows in which I'm interested. The URL for the stream is http://38.119.130.69/ramgen/broadcast/wwrl1600.rm

3. Setup your software and enjoy.
Setup your software to capture the above stream during the time your show is on air. Make sure you have enough disk space to hold the resulting audio file, which may be quite large. Then, at your convenience, not some money grubbing radio executive's, just double click on your captures audio file and enjoy.

Some of My Favorite Political Sites

Places to go for some truth, or at least for some interesting discussion.

Iraq Casualty Count: Every American should visit this site first, every day, to understand that while we are going about our business, brave men and women are dying for a mistake.
Accidental Wisdom: Wild wide ranging blog discussion with the occasional nugget of wisdom. Not all political, but a fair amount.
Media Matters for America: Somebody's got to list the lies of the right wing media. These guys do it well.
Daily Kos: You can't call yourself a liberal if you don't drop by the Kos on occasion.