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Scheduled Recording of Streamed Audio?

Posted by Cliff on from the a-TiVo-for-internet-radio dept.

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?

3 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Total Recorder by Murphy+Murph · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    --
    I dub thee... Sir Phobos, Knight of Mars, Beater of Ass.
    1. Re:Total Recorder by fm6 · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.

  2. From the History department..... by szyzyg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!