Can You Timeshift Streaming Audio?

Ralph Bearpark asks: "There are several hundred/thousand radio stations out there putting out live streaming audio on the Internet. What if you want to regularly record your favorite show at, say, 11:30 on Wednesday on BBC Radio 4 and then, maybe, download it to your MP3 player for listening on the move ... How'd you do this? Is there software out there already? If not, what would you need to put it together?"

Streambox VCR

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, there was a company last year that produced a program called Streambox VCR that did most of what your looking for (unfortunately, I think it was a win32 application only). They got sued by Real over copyright infringement or some such thing and there's an injunction against the program being made available to the public. There might be a few beta versions still floating around out there though. Again, this is all from my poor recolection, so I'm ready to stand corrected.

SB Live

[Kev Vance]

The SoundBlaster Live (EMU-10K1) has a great mixer that lets you route the DSP output back into recording input. This way, it's trivial to record any audio being sent to the soundcard. At least, it is under linux. I imagine that the windows mixer has similar capabilities if that's the platform you're doing this on.

Re:helpful hints

[crisco]

Under Windows, you can use something called Streambox VCR to save .rm video streams.

Re:helpful hints

[crisco]

OK, since that was -1 redundant I'll provide a link to a copy [telia.com] of dubious legality.

Re:helpful hints

[Chris Pimlott]

That's the truly sad thing... streaming media formats have been designed for mediocrity. Business doesn't want a format that's truly high quality and the last thing they want you to be able to do is save it.

I wish everyone would just use streaming MP3 - high quality, cross platform compatible, cheap. Don't see it ever happening though. About the only place I ever saw use it was CDNow, and only on a small number of tracks (along with RealAudio on a large number). Now they're RA and Windows Media only. Sigh.

Under Linux/Unix

[The Iconoclast]

simple. Setup a cron job to run wget get at a specified time. Or listen to a cool station like WRUW [cwru.edu] that will eventually save a weeks worth of radio on a streaming digital "tape" loop.

Re:helpful hints

[lunatik17]

If you're running Linux, all you have to do is open up options in xmms and change the output plugin to disk-writer :) I've done it, it works fine. A little slow, and it outputs to wav. But you can easily compress it to mp3 once you get to that point. Of course, that only applies to mp3 streams. I'll have to check out paudio. Is there any way to save video streams in RM format?

Total Recorder

[jeff_tyrrill]

For Windows, Total Recorder [highcriteria.com] will record to disk the sound output of any program. It can either play it through the sound card also, or remain silent. It can also be scheduled to start and stop at a specific time, using command-line parameters or its built-in scheduler. You can schedule RealPlayer or any other media player to start a minute or so after the time Total Recorder has been scheduled to start to create a completely automatic system to record recurring broadcasts.

yep

[ArchieBunker]

Set the mixer to "what u hear" and then fire up your favorite recording program. For windows I prefer soundforge. You could also use the frauenhoffer mp3 encoder, it can encode mp3 in realtime.

Re:helpful hints

[demonsweat]

Or you could just select 'Save stream to disk' from the streaming options of the mp3 input plugin... Surprisingly new-ish WinAmps can do this also.

helpful hints

[xjesus]

I've wondered the same thing before. I don't think RealAudio wants you to be able to save streams for liability reasons. And i just did some tinkering with winamp's writing capabilities... It appears that broadcasts using SHOUTcast (streaming MP3 ala live365 [live365.com]) also do not allow you to record streams due to "copyright issues".

RIAA and associates, do not read below:
If you are using windows, there's a piece of software called Stream Save [jumbo.com] that lets you save a SHOUTcast stream to disk (still in MP3 format). If you are running Linux there's a program called paudio [syr.edu] that lets you capture and save raw audio data being written to the soundcard. You might be able to mod it to compress it to mp3/vorbis/whetever before it hits the disk with a little tinkering.