Coast to ‘Cast (Coast to Coast AM Podcast)
May 4, 2005
Even the tinfoil hat crowd knows that “on demand” is where it’s at for audio these days.
I admit it—I’m a long-time fan of “Coast to Coast”, the old Art Bell tinfoil hat conspiracy radio program. Art is only on weekends now, and I’m a bit less of a fan of George Noory on weeknights, but it’s still all good.
Over the course of a week or so listening to Coast to Coast, you will hear some of the damndest things. While they do have some pretty interesting far-from-the-edge guests (people like Ray Kurzweil, Michio Kaku, etc.) I particularly enjoy the little tone Art gets in his voice when he gets a caller (or guest) from seriously deep in the rabbit-hole - he manages somehow to be very polite, yet I swear you can hear him roll his eyes…
At any rate, I’m a fan. Unfortunately, it a) comes on late at night, and b) I can’t do spoken word audio when I’m writing code (it distracts me and I can pay attention to one or the other), so for the past year or so I’ve been laboriously downloading 4 MP3s for each of their programs (via their paid Streamlink service), joining them together, making them into bookmarkable AAC files, and putting them on my iPod to enjoy while driving, doing chores, etc.
Since it’s a pain in the butt to do that every few weeks, I’m thrilled that they’ve announced they will be offering their shows as PodCasts beginning next Monday.
Details are a little sketchy as yet - the site mentions a program to download for Mac and Windows users, but hopefully it will work with podcast-ware like iPodderX, so that I can automate format conversions, etc. You still need to be a Streamlink member, but Streamlink is dirt cheap compared to most spoken word audio you can purchase, and best of all, all of the commercial crap is stripped out of Streamlink downloads (making each “hour” about 40 minutes).
If you’re not familiar with Coast to Coast, they’re offering a “free Streamlink weekend” this weekend, where you can go to the site and download a bunch for your listening pleasure—check it out.
As always, the trick is to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out…
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Please help! I am both visually- and hearing impaired, thus must use adaptive software to acess the internet, but nothing suitable to my needs permits cookie enabling. Thus I can’t get subscribed to streamlink.
Cornell library staff and premier networks staff tried in vane to make it work for me. What can I do!
Mike
Hi Mike;
I’m afraid that I don’t have a good answer for that — I don’t really know how Premier’s mechanisms work. Perhaps someone else reading this post will know more and be able to fill us in…