Streaming audio recorder

[™]

<to avoid bannage i have removed this link>

[budrick]

Alternatively, mplayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu) and VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) have the ability to save streams if you don't want to pay for that software :)

mplayer is slightly more flexible than VLC in terms of actually getting the stream (not necessarily playing), but doesn't have a GUI under Windows. On the other hand, VLC will transcode on the fly and does have a nice enough GUI :)

[Al2]

That reminds me. I suppose I should find a decent recorder for the Linux thread. Budrick, since you mention mplayer, perhaps you could give a demonstration there? :)

[titanic]

just a silly question but would these programs be used for "AQUIRING" music from internet radio sourses of which you dont have permision to save?

just wondering like...

[budrick]

Sure :) There are plenty of options to choose from with mplayer, although it COULD be slightly better.

Anyway, let's get to it. mplayer is primarily a command-line media player originally designed for Linux. It also has the ability to directly use Windows codecs under both Windows and Linux, which makes it very versatile.

Just a word of warning - this does rather rely on you having found out the direct address of the stream. This may mean picking apart webpages, and in extreme cases lots of Javascript to piece things together, but sometimes not too. You can't just point it at a webpage with an embedded stream.

At the simplest level of saving streams, there's the -dumpstream commandline switch. This literally just dumps whatever comes down the wire to a file in the current directory called 'stream.dump'. An example:

commandprompt> mplayer -dumpstream "http://address/of/stream"

It doesn't matter what format the stream is in at this point - mplayer will just dump it to the file stream.dump. It can handle most protocols that you throw at it - HTTP, RTSP and MMS being the most common ones you'll come across. Also note the double-quotes around the stream address - they're not strictly necessary, but it'll save a lot of hassle if you get into the habit of using them when using web addresses on the command line.

If you want, you can specify a filename to dump the stream to as well, using the -dumpfile option in conjunction with -dumpstream. This is useful if you do already know the file format you'll end up with. So:

commandprompt> mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile outputfile.wmv "http://address/of/stream"

will spit out a file called outputfile.wmv[/code]

Finally for now, let's say there's a video stream out there, and you just want the audio. That's no problem, but there will be more work involved. mplayer will allow you to dump the audio directly from a stream or file, but only in a few formats. We'll go with a standard WAV file for this one. To do this:

commandprompt> mplayer -ao pcm -aofile outputfile.wav "http://address/of/stream"

This will give you a WAV file called outputfile.wav. Run it through an encoder to convert to your favourite audio format, and you're sorted.

You can also dump the video separately, but I haven't explored this option yet as I've had no need for silent movies!

Apologies, because this is a rather sketchy introduction, but it's something to work from. If you remind me I'll write a simple guide to setting up the codecs and whatnot for about as full support for file formats as you'll ever get later on, and expand on this :)

[™]

just a silly question but would these programs be used for "AQUIRING" music from internet radio sourses of which you dont have permision to save?

just wondering like...
i 've removed the linkage and urge you to stop or we'll all get b&.

i wont use these programs for copyright infringement.

and you shouldnt either