It's long saddened me that you can't get Prairie Home Companion as a podcast: there's too many songs from too many authors so they don't even try to acquire the rights. Our copyright regime still needs to adapt to the modern world.
Has anyone found an online source for full archived shows?
Surely someone somewhere has them saved...
The APM player is open source.
https://github.com/APMG/APMPlayer
But no need to deep dive the source.
When you open a player page's source, you see a line like this:
var playables = [{"identifier":"apm_audio:\/phc\/2016\/07\/02\/phc_20160702_128.mp3"}];
Looks like the end of a URL, but what is the beginning? It isn't prairiehome.publicradio.org where the page is served from.
Opening the apmplayer-all.min.js, there is:
function(){var d={"apm-audio":{flash_server_url:"rtmp://ondemand-rtmp.stream.publicradio.org/music",flash_file_prefix:"mp3:ondemand",http_file_prefix:"http://ondemand-http.stream.publicradio.org",buffer_time:3,t...},"apm-live-audio"
You get the beginning of the URL for the file. Put two and two together, you get:
http://ondemand-http.stream.publicradio.org/phc/2016/07/02/p...
Now that we have the format and know that PHC is a weekly show, you could directly grab or make a bulk download script.
http://ondemand-http.stream.publicradio.org/phc/YYYY/MM/DD/p...
Note: the archive only has Sept 2012 onward - http://prairiehome.org/shows/2012/09/ Before that, episodes are Realplayer RAM files on the old archive page.
I think streams where you don't pick the song that comes up next can also be licensed more similarly to radio broadcasts.
The law itself isn't really the question here; it's more the economic entities and standard agreements built to sustain broadcast use of music can't be adapted to podcast use in a cost-effective way.
This is also why we don't have the Massive Attack song as the intro to "House, M.D." on streaming services any more.
The thing is sometimes there's not much distance between an homage and a satire. Fred Armisen's Portlandia is a good example of a show that wobbles between gently poking fun and outright mean-spirited mockery.
Once I learned all the Prarie Home Companion episodes were written from New York City it became much easier to see some of those skits as GK laughing at Lake Woebegone residents rather than with them.
I don't think you understand his work. You don't have to like it, but that doesn't mean you know what he's trying to say.
I understand he's trying to depict a bucolic lifestyle and portray himself as a resident and narrator of this fictional little town. But in my opinion if you're sitting at a remove from the area that inspires these stories it's possible for another perspective to color your view. Culturally NYC and St. Paul much less Lake Woebegone are vastly different.
Nobody's saying you have to agree with me, but I do get what he's trying to do. I just find it harder to believe it's anything but entirely fiction as opposed to a tapestry woven from an underlying truth with the names changed to protect the innocent, and for me that makes all the difference.
It'd be one thing if he was born and raised in NY, but he grew up and spent most of his life in Minnesota. Surely as a writer he is able to invoke his past memories with sincerity in creating this fictional narrative. Or do you believe that as soon as he crossed the Minnesota border, all that was lost, and as he stepped into a NYC Starbucks he became a jaded cynical New Yorker.