Inexpert user question

[Jon Davies]

On 15 August 2011 17:57, Paul Denley <P.Denley at bath.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hi
> While I am fascinated by some of the contributions to this forum, the recent
> discussion about Windows is like a foreign language to me and I'm almost
> embarrassed to ask for help at a much more basic level.

don't be embarrassed ;-)  this is both a user-support and developer
mailing list, and some of the messages won't make a lot of sense to
someone who's not trying to develop get_iplayer

> I have had some problems recently with using get_iplayer to get some radio
> programmes. This seems to be quite a recent thing - everything seemed to
> work fine before.
> I'm using the latest version (v2.79 for Windows with a patch from somewhere
> which was recommended on this forum). I can find the programme that I want
> OK, then I run:
>>get_iplayer --get [programme number]
> It finds the programme I want and downloads it but then continues to
> download a number of other programmes as well seemingly at random. I can
> crash get_iplayer to stop this but what is going wrong?

my best guess is that the programme number you're using happens to be
in the title of another programme, but this has never happened to me.
If get_iplayer [search terms] finds the programme you want, then you
could just add --get to that.

If you can add "-t" to the get_iplayer command line then it does a
test run and doesn't actually download anything, but does tell you
what it would do.  If you can do that and attach the result someone
may be able to help more.

> The other problem is that the radio programme download is as a .m4a file
> rather than .mp3. I have a program to convert these files but how can I set
> it to download as .mp3.

You're not the first person to need this - see
  http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/get_iplayer/2011-July/001720.html

If you get stuck, just ask ;-)

Jon