Clips

Personally I haven't taken advantage of the new MP3 format that is on their website, although I'd happened to notice it a couple months back. Once I heard about the whole 'take down your RSS feed' scandal on the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, I got interested. Darn! Why didn't I think of that!? I didn't pay much more any attention, but looked up some information on technorati (the future is yesterday » Unofficial This American Life Podcast is no More). Sounds to me like TAL got a little ahead of themselves - perhaps they thought they could save a little money by avoiding the RealAudio distribution method. Oops! Sounds like this little email confirms something of that.

I got this in my mailbox yesterday - this is from the email mailing list that Elizabeth Meister sends out every week or two

STREAMING MP3 LISTENERS: AN EXPLANATION. You may have noticed that you can no longer fast-forward or rewind our files. If you're using Windows Media Player or RealPlayer, you can still pause as you listen; sadly, if you're using ITunes, you can't. We know that this loss of functionality isn't great – in fact, it stinks. Unfortunately, we we've been forced make some changes that protect our files from unauthorized downloads, and these changes will, at least temporarily, cause you to lose some of the features you've probably grown accustomed to. While we aren't happy with this development, contractual obligations left us no choice; unauthorized downloads were beginning to get out of hand. Regardless, we are still absolutely committed to offer free streaming audio, and we're actively researching ways that we can again make it possible for you to grab your coffee and rewind to catch what you missed. We've also been thinking more broadly about our online audio future, and will keep you posted on new developments on our website and via our weekly email list. Thanks for your understanding and patience while we work through this.

I went over to TAL myself and found that although the links are still to m3u files, the content (the mp3 files) isn't there anymore.