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Scheduled Recording of Streamed Audio?
sborisch asks: "I have tried at least 15 different Internet Radio/Shoutcast players, looking for one with a scheduler (recorder) capability that actually works. The closest I have found are IRadio and Replay Radio, but IRadio depends on the Windows scheduler, and isn't the least bit reliable in my test of it. Replay seems to want to send everything through your sound card, and hence makes it impossible to listen to something and record something else at the same time. It does have a so-called direct download option, but this doesn't seem to work either. Surely someone has found a better solution than this. Please let me know." How would you schedule a recording streaming audio from either Windows or Unix?
Since this is Slashdot - people might have a perverse interest in how I recorded BBC radio to mp3 back in 96/97
I had a good old fashioned FM receiver which I tuned into Radio 1, it got good reception, but not quite good enough for stereo. The output of this went into a Linux PC with a rather expensive signal capture device, which I'd rescued from the trash. This was an old fashioned ISA card which had a 20 bit ADC and I could tune the frequency to almost anything I wanted. This was used by some former resident of the observatory for some scientific work, but, being scientific grade it made an excellent sound card. At least a lot better than the built in sound on my Alpha workstation.
It was installed in an old 486 DX2/66 running linux, I had to write my own driver, I had a lot of time on my hands. This was great for capturing audio, but it didn't have enough disk space for the show or enough CPU for real time mp3 encoding.
Instead I encoded it using Shorten and piped it across the network to a more modern PC which had a couple of gigs of disk space, I could get about 8-10 hours of mono audio on there.
This host would then decode the SHN data and encode it to mp3 using Fraunhofer's l3Enc - a very early command line mp3 encoder which was available for linux. I ran this in the highest quality mode available, since the data was already stored in SHN format. I don't think that there were any machines that could reliably encode realtime mp3 at that time, so this 2 stage process was needed.
Ultimately, I stored the essential mix files to a RAID array made up of 6 1Gig SCSI disks, these disks were mounted in pairs inside cases which were about the size of a PC.
I am recalling this archaic procedure as I'm backing up my entire Essential mix collection to a 300gig disk which is about the size of a book.
Moore's Law Rocks!
If you've got a mac, try audio hijack for grabbing the stream (from any software).
Wake up.
I've been doing this for sometime, recording about an hour of 3WK each night for listening to on the way to work. I've used bluecanard's freeware software sound recorder. It converts any sound on your system to MP3, and is command line driven. So, I just make a batch file that opens up the stream in my browser, then wait a few seconds, and fires off the commands to record it.
Although, now that I notice it, it seems they have a beta version of an internet radio recorder that would be right up your alley, and mine too. Answered a question, and learned something new and beneficial myself. Wow, gotta love how THAT worked out.
Like my comments? Try my podcast: http://www.baldmove.com
Nah, making it too complicated.
cron + "curl http://thestream.foo/stream > ~/stream.mp3"
It's just one big MPEG stream, which is all an MP3 file is..