UKH

Hypothetically if my third cousins hairdresser wanted to record     Some session tracks from a 6 music show that is on bbc sounds how would they go about it ? The whole show is on sounds but they were hypothetically wondering how to record the four tracks which are separated by some other gubbins .  Addrianne Lenker played a stunningly good session on  hue Stephen’s show on Wednesday and  my third cousin was asking how to preserve it.

Depends on your device...

If you have a Windows laptop, a quick Google shows these options 

https://www.howtogeek.com/217348/how-to-record-the-sound-coming-from-your-p...

I use the Bandicam app to make screen-recordings, which include the audio. The free version limits recordings to 10 minutes but I would then export the video clip as an audio file using Shotcut, also free to download. (This is a Windows solution.)

https://www.bandicam.com/

https://www.shotcut.org/download/

Hook your cassette player up to the wireless and then press the play and record buttons at the same time👍

I've used Audacity on a Mac to record music, from memory its free & works quite well.

Putting to one side the legality or otherwise of what your third cousin's hairdresser would like to achieve...

get-iplayer https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer is specifically designed to download content from BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds.  It has installers for Windows and MacOS, but has to be manually installed on Linux (some installers have been created for certain Linux distros but these are not supported by the developers of get-iplayer itself).

https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer

https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer/releases/tag/v3.35 (latest release)

https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer/wiki/installation

As a primarily Mac user, I use the Get iPlayer Automator app, which puts a reasonably friendly graphical front-end on the 'raw' get-iplayer.  Get iPlayer Automator will also download programmes from STV Player - which includes most ITV1 content, though not feature films.  I'm not sure whether 'raw' get-iplayer will do that.  (Get iPlayer Automator does it using its "use current webpage" feature i.e. you navigate to the programme you want in STV Player in your browser, then click a button in the app to tell it that's the programme you want.  This is also the technique you have to use for iPlayer and Sounds programmes which aren't listed in the 30-day iPlayer/Sounds cache.  get-iplayer has similar functionality through its command line interface but as I mentioned above I'm not sure whether it works for STV Player.)

https://github.com/Ascoware/get-iplayer-automator

These apps are completely reliant on the BBC not disabling the APIs that the apps use to do the downloading.  I believe get-iplayer has had to be modified a number of times in the past to get round changes that the BBC made in their API.  The bottom line is that both apps may stop working at any time without notice.   Get iPlayer Automator used to be able to download ITV programmes as well as BBC until ITV Hub was superseded by ITVX which employs DRM.

Whichever of the above apps is used to download the required programme, once the audio file has been downloaded from BBC Sounds it should be a simple enough job to edit it down to just the sections of the programme that you want.  Audacity is a generally well-regarded app for this kind of job, available on MacOS, Windows and Linux:

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases/tag/Audacity-3.5.1

One thing to beware of with recording audio from a playback on the computer is interruptions in the audio playback from things like notifications.  That's why some people prefer to download the original audio file and work from that.

In any case, recording in real time is just sooo 20th century...

Does one have to jiggle about with inputs and such, or can it pretty much record as the stream plays from source?

Agreed that's better, but sometimes the iPlayer doesn't offer downloading as an option

Life was so much easier in the good old days

The BBC shut down the download-to-desktop functionality for both iPlayer and Sounds on 8th April this year.

However, you can still download to the iOS and Android apps, and that's the route that get-iplayer and Get iPlayer Automator use to download to a desktop.  (I have never yet come across a programme listed in the iPlayer/`Sounds cache or on the iPlayer or Sounds web sites that get-iplayer couldn't download.  Which is not to say that that happy situation will continue for ever.)

It still is.  Zoom Digital Sound recorders are everything that cassettes weren't but at CD quality or more on to a SD card, choice of recording formats and quality.

eg

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zoom-Surround-Sound-Microphones-Ambisonics-Intervi...

good for sound recording out of doors and all sorts as well as digitising from a good cassette or record deck

good for dumping and loading assembler code and machine code for retro computers as well without any of the droputs from cassette

If you're happy on the command line then yt-dlp is the usual answer to making local copies of content from bbc sounds, iplayer and a surprisingly large number of other sources. 

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

A friend of your third cousin's hairdresser's brother just tried it out on a program on BBC sounds and it worked very nicely. It does just give you a single audio file for the whole show though, so you'd need to chop out the bits you were interested in e.g. using Audacity mentioned above (another great piece of free software!)

And if you ever come across some of those old cassettes, and find little snippets of Tommy Vance's dulcet tones just prior to your selected top 40 recording... nostalgia overload!!

got loads of old peelie tapes i want to digitise, but wondering if an external sound card would be required for best results?

I've got a bit of 1970s football commentary on the end of one of my tapes.  Gold!

I've got a BBC drama tape somewhere recorded off air in about 1981 and on the end of it is a screen dump (from the same period) of a kit built computer recorded at 300 baud so excited was I to have aquired a cassette interface for the computer.   You had to laboriously key in the machine code loader program without error before you could read anything (previously saved) in from tape though.