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?

Comments

MPlayer

[thegrassyknowl]

mplayer has -ao and -vo (audio out and video out) redirection options so you can dump streams to files on your disk. It plays all of the streams I have thrown at it in the past.

Script it with cron?

Re:MPlayer

[TeknoHog]

I've used MPlayer with a script that's called from my crontab. It is basically like this:

mplayer -cache 8 -dumpstream -dumpfile $outfile $address &
mpid=$!
sleep $duration
kill $mpid

Streamripper + Windows Scheduler?

[Bravo_Two_Zero]

...or Streamripper + cron on *nix (or win32 with cron installed). Maybe I'm oversimplifying?

http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/

Re:Streamripper + Windows Scheduler?

[ahknight]

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..

streamripper and 'at'

[Bren]

Use these two programs:

http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/
ftp://juri x.jura.uni-sb.de/pub/jurix/source/chroot /appl/at/

Streamripper to download the stream, and at to schedule it for a single time. Use cron instead of at to schedule a recurring thing.

Total Recorder

[Murphy Murph]

For Windows Total Recorder http://www.highcriteria.com/ will copy any audio stream - protected or not - on a schedule, or real time.

Re:Total Recorder

[fm6]

I've used that one. It works very well, though the user interface is a little klunky. The interesting thing is that if you tell it to direct the recorded stream to disk without also playing it back, Real Player will start playing back the stream as fast as it can get it off the net. Doesn't make any different with a live stream, but if the server is pulling up a recording for you, it speeds up too. So if you, for example, record an old 30-minute NPR interview, the recording will only take about 20 minutes.

Of course that brings up a nasty issue. NPR presumably makes a lot of money from the downloadable material on audible.com. If a lot of people started downloading that same material for free from the NPR web site, I suspect a lot of that material would cease to be available.

Why they work through your sound card

[fm6]

To record a stream directly, you need software that translates the data from the stream into the format you want to save. Now, that's not very hard technically, assuming you're good at reverse-engineering and the stream you're trying to read isn't encrypted. But people who manage to do that always run into one major problem: as soon as they release their product, the owners of the streaming format are on them, telling them they're in deep legal dodo until they stop selling tools for "pirating" their customers' data.

You can argue all you want about how legal or fair this is. But no developer has found it worthwhile to bankrupt him or herself in order to fight this kind of legal action. In any case, what's really needed is the political will to change the laws that favor IP hoarding.

The only way around this problem is to record the sounds after it's been translated by authorized software. The simple way is just to plug a patch cord into your sound card. Or you can get better fidelity by using a special sound driver that copies the audio stream to disk. But either way, you can't avoid tying up your sound card, since you have to con the authorized software into giving you a stream that's supposedly going directly to your speakers.

If you need real-time access to the recorded data, get two computers and a network.

From the History department.....

[szyzyg]

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!

For non MP3 formats

[RotJ]

Streambox VCR, which was sued out of existence by RealNetworks years ago, still works for Real audio and video streams, as well as for Microsoft's streaming formats. Here's a manual for it.

Recording Realaudio, WMF, OGG & MP3 Radio stre

[t482]

a post from my weblog:

Recording Realaudio, WMF, OGG & MP3 Radio streams on your Linux box

I wanted to record a couple of radio shows so that I can listen to them later on my linux machine. Basically I would like to listen to a mix of realplayer, Windows Media, Ogg and MP3 streams and save them as mp3 or ogg files so I can listen to them later on my computer or iriver ogg/mp3 player.

First I tried mplayer's dumpstream command

1) mplayer -dumpfile cores -dumpstream http://wm.warnermusic.com/France/the_corrs/summer_ sunshine/video/Summer_Sunshine_video_458.wmv
(thi s will give you a file called "cores" in your home-directory)

2) mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm -aofile audio.wav cores
(this will convert the videofile to a wav audiofile)

3) lame audio.wav cores.mp3
(this will convert the file from wav to mp3)

However this process core dumped on realplayer recordings over 10 minutes. Also it doesn't know about ram files so you have to download them first (wget filename) and then open them to file the real link to the rm file. So I went on to look for some other tools.

Most of the tools seem to be wrappers around vsound and/or sox and lame/oggenc. Another tool I looked at is streamripper, which works for mp3 or ogg streams.

First I grabbed realcap which is a shell script front end to those tools. Downloaded, compiled and installed vsound.

Trick one - you have to ensure that realplayer is using OSS drivers
http://www.osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/radio/

After that seemed to work I tried directly with vsound. vsound acts as a kind of virtual audio loopback cable ... it allows you to record the output audio stream of ... and line out jacks on the sound card.

vsound --timing -f myfile.wav realplay http://www.radio.org/ra/show.ram
oggenc myfile.wav
xmms myfile.ogg

I also checked out the trplayer - which is a command line wrapper to realplayer. http://www.linux-speakup.org/trplayer.html.

Got the error:
Failed to load rmacore.so.6.0: /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/Common/rmacore.so.6.0: Cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Well I figured out that they must be looking for the real player in /usr/lib when it was in /usr/local/ so I copied the directories over to where it wanted to find them and everything worked ok.

Also I tried out streamripper
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/ , which seemed to work fine ripping various streams. It didn't seem to be able to read the .m3u file so I had to download the m3u file with wget and look at it and then use streamripper http://url.ogg for it to work. Cool - now I can listen to the BBC, NPR, CBC, ABC (Australian Broadcasting) and Netherlands Broadcasting when I want to and where I want to.

Finally I had a look at mp3record - a bash shell wrapper for lame and sox
Basically it does this:
(sox -r $strFreqRate -t ossdsp -w -s /dev/dsp -t raw -c 2 -
| lame -s 44.1 -x -b $strBitRate -m s - $strFileName) &

Mac tools

[dourk]

If you've got a mac, try audio hijack for grabbing the stream (from any software).

bleucanard

[neolith]

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.

there's still time to save yourself!

[Anonymous Coward]

Save yourself, pirate!

Of course, unauthorized duplication of content, including so-called "time-shifting" is against the law.

We are fully aware of your activities. We can dispatch agents to your home at any time. And we will.

However we are merciful. We will give you time to mend your ways. Simply visit the nearest Copyright Enforcement Station and confess. We will release you soon after, given you a second chance.

Simply do this and destroy your illegal copies, and you will be spared.

We see and know all. Save yourself. Your life is in YOUR hands.

-- The RIAA

NetTransport

[s4f]

NetTransport, it's the Holy Grail of media downloading. The scheduler works well when you get past its idiosyncrasies, but all in all, it's the best tool I've found. And I've been looking for years.

Replay Radio or WM Recorder or RM Recorder

[applian]

Applian has two different recording solutions for Windows:

Replay Radio works well by recording sound coming out of your speaker, and can tune to any audio URL. It comes with a Guide of almost 1000 shows and stations, and is easy to use. It saves MP3 files, or lets you add a post-processing command to run your command-line encoder to make WMA, OGG, etc.

http://www.replay-radio.com/

WM Recorder and RM Recorder record raw Windows Media and Real streams (video, too), and come with a VCR-program when you buy them in a bundle. You'll need a separate program to convert these to MP3, but they work really well.

http://www.wmrecorder.com/

Pretty easy with UNIX/Linux

[anewsome]

I record the Jim Rome radio show from my streaming server at home every day on my work PC. I've done this for over 4 months and never missed a momment of the show.

In crontab:
0 9 * * * /usr/local/bin/recordRadio 1 1>/dev/null 2>&1
0 10 * * * /usr/local/bin/recordRadio 2 1>/dev/null 2>&1
0 11 * * * /usr/local/bin/recordRadio 3 1>/dev/null

It's a three hour show, I create three seperate files because it's easier for me that way. /usr/local/bin/radioRecord:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# $Id: radioRecord,v 1.3 2004/10/19 18:37:29 anewsome Exp $
use strict;

my $num = $ARGV[0];
my $time = 3600;
my $date = `date +%F`;
$date =~ s/\n//g;
my ($year, $month, $day) = split(/-/, $date);
my $cmd = "mkdir -p /radio/$year/$month/";
system($cmd);
my $file = "/radio/$year/$month/Jim-Rome-$year-$month-$day-$n um.wav";
my $timedOut = 0;
my $pid;
my $command = qq~/usr/bin/ogg123 -d wav --file "$file" http://myhost/dss.ogg~;

$SIG{ALRM} = \
if ($pid = fork) {
#print "Launched pid: $pid\n";
} elsif (defined $pid) {
exec("$command");
} else {
die "Can't fork for some reason\n";
}

alarm($time);
while (1) {
if ($timedOut == 1) {
#print "Timeout, killing $pid\n";
kill INT => $pid;
exit;
}
select(undef, undef, undef, 0.25);
}

sub timeOut {
$timedOut = 1;
}