After four years of good service it is time to retire my RealToMp3 audio downloading script. With the BBC's switch from RealMedia to Windows Media (WMA) streams it has become excessively laborious to set up individual streams to collect. As such, I have switched to Nerd of the Herd's Radio Downloader for all my podcast and stream downloading needs.
The Radio Downloader is a Windows-only graphical wrapper for various open source tools (the same tools as my script used). It's very much geared towards the novice user, but the options it lacks don't affect its usefulness. Upon installation it will run upon startup, and stay resident thereafter. There is not an option to stop it from running at startup. Ideally, I'd like a command-line option for it to run once, collect whatever audio is then available, then exit. There is a command-line option to make it exit, so I have a scheduled task that runs half an hour after login to stop the Radio Downloader, which gives it enough time to do its business, and then leaves my struggling old PC free to do other tasks.