Turn Old Radio Shows and Audiobooks Into Podcasts With Fourble
Radio transmission archives are hard to find; when available at all, they are often in awkward formats. (I had to buy one season as a music album and another as an audiobook to get my hands on the radio comedy series Cockpit Pressure .) You can find several shows on the Internet Archive , but listening to them is inconvenient. The Fourble website solves this problem.
Fourble is two things, firstly, it is a tool to get a list of mp3s from the internet and turn them into a podcast feed that you can download to any podcast player. Second, it is a catalog of shows that have been converted to podcasts with this tool.
On Fourble you can find over 750 shows, a wide range of radio broadcasts, contemporary and historical, mainly from the UK and USA. Some of the best ones are:
- Star Wars: The Original Radio Dramas : NPR audio adaptation of the original Star Wars trilogy
- The Wheel of Time : an audiobook from Robert Jordan’s fantasy TV series, split into over 700 chapters.
- Tumanbai : an epic radio drama inspired by a dynasty of Egyptian Mamluk slaves
- Dragnet : 344 episodes of a 1950s detective show ripped from the headlines
- Abbott and Costello : over 170 sketches, complete episodes and extracts from the comedy duo Who’s First.
- Gunsmoke : radio western from the 50s
- Yes, Minister : Radio Adaptation of British Political Sitcom
- The Flight of the Conchords : the forerunner of the band’s TV show
- The Complete Mr. Ripley : Adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel series
- Earthsearch : James Follett’s 80s Sci-Fi Drama About a Generation Ship Returning Home to Earth
- Lights Out : 30s / 40s American Horror Show
- John Finnemore Souvenir Program : Contemporary British Sketch Show
- A Song for Liebowitz : Audio Recording of a Novel by Walter M. Miller Jr.
- Robot I : Radio adaptation of Asimov’s stories
- Dark Expectations : A parody of the dumb Charles Dickens with episode titles such as Life Sadly Broken, Then Happily Rebuilt, A Dark Life Even Darker, and A Terrible Life Not Ruined Then Much Ruined
- That Mitchell & Webb Sound : the radio precursor to the That Mitchell & Webb Look TV show
- Angstrem : a Scandinavian detective parody by two writers for That Mitchell & Webb Look
- Sorry, I have no idea : Over 500 British Comedy Show episodes from the 70s to 2018
- Howard Stern 1990s : A Compilation of Old Stern Episodes
- The Ricky Gervais Show : The first 12 episodes of the show that made Carl Pilkington famous.
- Agatha Christie : 49 Adaptations of a BBC Detective Writer
- The Adventures of Horatio Hornblower : Radio Adaptations of 1950s CS Forester Novels
- Blue Jam : An evening show from the 90s by Brass Eye creator Chris Morris, interspersed with music and sometimes disturbing comedic sketches.
- Per Hour : News Parody Show by Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci and First Appearance of Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge
For each show, you can customize how quickly episodes appear in the podcast feed. If you find a bunch of mp3 files somewhere on the Internet, you can create a new podcast feed for them, regardless of their content. You can, for example, turn a public music album into a podcast.
Fourble does not host these shows; it just creates an RSS feed for them. And many of these mp3 lists exist in the gray zone, so they should be removed. If the files are removed from the original source before they appear in your player, you will not be able to get them back. So if you think the show might be disabled (but you feel that the files currently available are not considered stolen), download it immediately.
Fourble is named after “Things on the Whiteboard of the Fourble,” the popular episode of the 1940s radio horror show ” Quiet Please!” It’s a creepy story about a creature that lives in the bowels of the earth, dug up and brought to light – like an old radio show buried in the Internet Archive. You can hear 86 episodes of ” Quiet, Please!” at Fourble.