tetteteent

This post is going to focus on some direct links to some spanish language podcasts. Most of them are from international broadcasters and as a result are news updates. They vary in length from 14 minutes or so up to an hour long. I'm SOOOO glad to see many international broadcasters start to make their news updates available via rss feeds in podcast format. A couple years ago I had pieced together some scripts to try to do the same, parse through a broadcasters web page for the latest audio download and then download it. It really was a pain in the neck mostly because they seem to always be redesigning their sites and that would of course break the way I was finding the audio. These days though mp3 is more common (at that time, many of them were windows media and realplayer streams that I had to stream and encode to mp3 on the fly.) Anyway.... if you don't have a program to catch podcasts you may just wish to visit the links below and use firefox in combination with the down-them-all plugin to download all the mp3 links on the pages. By default it asks if you want to download one that you already have, but you can switch it off so that it ignores duplicates. I like news programs for listening practice and have also just started using audiobooks and audio cuentos (audio stories) as another way of improving my Spanish language listening comprehension. I recently got a new audio player, a sansa clip plus which has been the large motivation for these recent link posts.... http://podcasts.voanews.com/podcastxml_local.cfm?id=162 Buenos Dias America from the Voice of America. Daily 30 minute program with a mix of news and other features. NHK Radio Japan - for some reason they only show the most recent program in their rss feed. This is Spains national broadcaster Todo Noticias 5 is their news only broadcaster. This one isn't a direct link to an rss feed mainly because although I find many podcasts, most of them are feature programs and not the kind of news summary programs that I was looking for. (Resumen de noticias)
Radio France International News bulletin at 10AM UTC in Spanish - I think this one was the one where I was not able to download anything past the last week or two in spite of a months worth in their feed. listing of all RFI podcasts - (at the bottom of the page you can find links for their other hourly updates.) BBC's the Mundo Hoy (world today). 14 minute news program. Cody's Cuentos - classic fairy tales in Spanish. As an adult I can't really say that I remember the originals that clearly anymore - but these are a fun listen. Of course there are more out there, but these alone can keep you listening for hours.