Downloading BBC Radio

[dinkypumpkin]

On 30/06/2013 17:24, James Moakes wrote:
> with the sad demise of Radio Downloader I've been trying to use
> Get_iPlayer to download radio shows and have a few questions.
> Is there a way to download radio programmes in higher quality or bit rate?

You always get the best quality available for radio programmes, barring 
any problems, which it appears you have.

> Is there a way to download radio shows in the MP3 or M4A format other
> than WMA?

You're only getting WMA because of problems access the Flash media 
servers.  See below.

> Also what are the various commands used to download radio shows with?
> Currently I've been using the get_iplayer --get --type=radio --pid=

You don't need --get with --pid, but it's harmless

> command with various degrees of success. Sometime a show downloads what
> I would call normally, other times it is very slow and doesn't look like
> it's doing anything.

That is because get_iplayer is falling back to WMA recording since it 
can't connect to the Flash media servers.  WMA recording can only be 
done in real time, so a 1 hour programme takes 1 hour to record.  WMA is 
the last resort when Flash streaming fails, and you can see why.

> Here are some of the programmes I've downloaded for you to see, it
> doesn't make any sense to me but there are error messages in there.

The error message below means the the rtmpdump utility is being denied 
access either to the network or to the media server:

> RTMPDump v2.4
> (c) 2010 Andrej Stepanchuk, Howard Chu, The Flvstreamer Team; license: GPL
> Connecting ...
> ERROR: RTMP_Connect0, failed to connect socket. 10013 (Unknown error)
> INFO: Command exit code 3 (raw code = 768)

There is no way to know how you have configured your machine, but the 
above error is what you would see if the firewall was configured to deny 
outbound connections on TCP port 1935 or to deny outbound connections to 
rtmpdump.  It seems unlikely you would have configured those exclusions 
specifically, but you may have some more general blocking rule 
configured.  Anyway, check your firewall configuration.  You also can 
quickly test if the problem is with the firewall by temporarily 
disabling it and trying a get_iplayer download.