Have you ever wanted to record your favorite music station’s show so you can hear it later and no podcast is availiable? I wanted to do so and started looking around. At first i started looking for windows programs doing such thing and stumbled uppon wm recorder which seemed to be a good solution. To be exact it is a good solution provided that one has a windows machine working at the time of the show he wants to record and he is willing to pay for the license of the program. But then i thought to my self that i have a linux machine 24/7 online why not find something working there. That, combined with a cronjob would be just sweet!
I snooped on the headers sent by the media server and saw it was a SHOUTcast server so i figured let’s google for a shoutcast linux recorder. And voila! Streamripper came up as the first choice and i think it is the best. It is a plain console app that can be hanled very easy and do just the job. No guis’ no nothing. Ofcourse for those of you that want a GUI to handle things then many frontends come around like KStreamripper. To check out the manual of the console and usage you can visit the Tutorial section of the official site.
Here is a sample script that records music for an hour:
streamripper http://yourstream.com -d /mnt/data/recordings/ -l 3600 -s -q > /dev/null
As you can see the “l” parameter specifies the time to record in seconds. For more info on the command line parameters use man or visit the tutorial mentioned above. Then just a cronjob starting the script on the start of the show is enough. Nice huh?