Feb

27

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Rip / record online radio stream

    Information Insemination    

I enjoy listening to music while doing my work, but doing it with online radio is not really enjoyable as during daytime, it’s hard to listen to 128 kbps stream without buffering issue, thanks to TMNut’s Streamyx. Even if (at times) it’s ok, the bandwidth is better saved for other meaningful purposes. What I did was to create a script to dump the broadcast, run it by midnight (the time when the highways is clear for Streamyx) and stop it in the early morning. Let cron help you with this and it should make your life even easier.

In my example, I’m using 1.FM’s Channel X, and a lot more is available from www.shoutcast.com’s playlists.
(Script updated on 20070301)

#!/bin/bash
URL=http://64.62.252.130:8070
WORKDIR=/home/shakir/temp/mplayerdump
MAXDUMP=3
CURRENTDUMP=`ls $WORKDIR | wc -l`

mv $WORKDIR/current.mp3 $WORKDIR/`date +%F`.mp3
if [ $CURRENTDUMP -ge $MAXDUMP ] ; then
   for i in `ls $WORKDIR | head -n $[($CURRENTDUMP-$MAXDUMP)+1]`; do
      rm $WORKDIR/$i
   done
fi 

mplayer -dumpstream  $URL -dumpfile $WORKDIR/current.mp3
#ffmpeg -i $URL -ab 128 $WORKDIR/current.mp3

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12 Comments to “Rip / record online radio stream”

• 

  khairul February 27, 2007 at 1:43 am

  dis is kewlll…
• 

  shakir February 27, 2007 at 1:50 am

  Thanks, and I’m waiting for someone to comment on the legal issue of doing this
• 

  mysurface February 27, 2007 at 2:00 pm

  Cool! Mplayer really capable of doing a lots more.
  What kind of file format is the dump file been recorded? Can we converted into mp3?
• 

  shakir February 28, 2007 at 3:58 am

  It’s saved as raw stream, and I haven’t tried any player other than mplayer to play the file. Haven’t tried converting it too, but I guess mencoder can help with that.
• 

  mysurface February 28, 2007 at 2:32 pm

  Haha, just put as .mp3 will do, I have tried.

  mplayer -dumpstream $URL -dumpfile $DUMPDIR/current.mp3

  by the way, you can use ffmpeg for dumping too, and it is much more better, because the size of the file is visible to you.

  ffmpeg -i $URL -ab 128 current.mp3
• 

  shakir March 1, 2007 at 12:45 am

  Thanks for pointing these out. And talking about size, the original script should be updated to delete old dumps as one night’s dump can take around 300MB for a 96kbps stream.

  #!/bin/bash
  URL=http://64.62.252.130:8070
  WORKDIR=/home/shakir/temp/mplayerdump
  MAXDUMP=3
  CURRENTDUMP=`ls $WORKDIR | wc -l`
  

  mv $WORKDIR/current.mp3 $WORKDIR/`date +%F`.mp3
  if [ $CURRENTDUMP -ge $MAXDUMP ]
  then
      for i in `ls $WORKDIR | head -n $[($CURRENTDUMP-$MAXDUMP)+1]`
      do
          rm $WORKDIR/$i
      done
  fi
  

  #mplayer -dumpstream $URL -dumpfile $WORKDIR/current.mp3
  ffmpeg -i $URL -ab 128 $WORKDIR/current.mp3
• 

  Vishal July 25, 2007 at 5:24 pm

  how about if you want to just record one show from say 10:00 am to 12:00 pm for 2 hours? Can you help with that please..

  thanks,
  vishal
• 

  Donneker July 26, 2007 at 1:24 am

  Hi, I dunno if you could use this, but I have modified an bash script which I found on the Internet myself. Its called radio_rip. I modified it best for my needs, and it saves bandwith because you can hear and record music just with one single connection to the streaming server. because of the base how its working, it has some buffer seconds, which perhaps could be enough for your internet connection too. I would advise that you try it, and perhaps you could mail me how you found it. See http://www.donneker.de/projects/radio-rip
  hf & gl
• 

  shakir July 26, 2007 at 2:16 am

  Vishal: You can take a look at cron and see what you can do to start the script. As to stop it, I normally have a killall command in my cron entry, or to be based on the mplayer’s man page, you’re supposed to be able to do this too:

  -endpos 56
  Stop at 56 seconds.
  -endpos 01:10:00
  Stop at 1 hour 10 minutes.

  Donneker:
  I’ve downloaded and tried you script + streamtuner, and I must say it’s a good one. My script however is meant for a simple purpose and I hope it serve its purpose well
• 

  KwangErn Liew July 27, 2007 at 8:49 am

  For legalties, it’s not a problem. RIAA even confirmed it.

  http://hypebot.typepad.com/hypebot/2007/07/riaa-admits-str.html
• 

  A August 5, 2008 at 10:07 pm

  this script Stop the record.
  only required adjust the recording time via the crontab

  #!/bin/sh
  aa=`ps -A | grep mplayer | awk ‘{print $1}’`
  kill -9 $aa
• 

  Daljeet December 17, 2009 at 9:30 pm

  i have a Stream and I want to create 1 minute capsules of the stream continuously,, how can i do it with ffmpeg or any other tool ?