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?

Streamripper + Windows Scheduler?

[Bravo_Two_Zero]

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

http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/

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.

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.