Internet Radio
I’ve always enjoyed listening to radio more than my own collection of music. This is mainly because of the uncertainty that radio offers, and because I really like to discover new and different types of music. For a long time I tuned in to Delhi’s only FM station (102.6), daily at 1AM for something called the “Wicked Hour”. Believe it or not, this was the only hour with bearable music in Delhi back then.
Then I found Internet Radio. This was a whole new world! Quality radio with no (or very little) irritating ads! For the past few years I’ve been listening to Radio Paradise almost exclusively! With a tagline of “Eclectic intelligent rock”, it suits my tastes almost perfectly. Has a great forum where you can discuss music that is being played and rate it in real time. Pretty amazing! It is playing almost 24×7 on my desktop (sometimes even when I’m not home!!)
Recently I found a great little piece of software called Stream Ripper. This basically runs either as a winamp plugin, or from the command line (even in linux!), and records whatever is playing on a shoutcast stream. The great part is that it even splits the stream into individual music files complete with ID3 information! There are variants of this, such as Stream Ripper 32, and the more powerful Station Ripper. Station Ripper allows you to rip upto 200 shoutcast streams at the same time. It even maintians a database of the songs it has downloaded to avoid duplication.
Now all I need is a shinny new ipod, and I am all set to have my favourite radio stations on the go!
Edit(01/12/04): Finally gave in to the temptation and ordered a 10GB ipod through amazon today. Got a pretty sweet deal ($236 including shipping) on it. Cant wait for it to get here!!
January 12th, 2004 at 1:51 am
Hmmm….well but I still miss wicked hour! haha. Well I did not mind the ad’s sometimes they were informative, sometimes they were so funny. But the ripper stuff you have there is cool. I was always looking for a neat way to save streamed content. However, I was wondering if I wanted to save a voice chat I had with my family, or some music playing at musicindiaonline.com would this help? can one override a proprietery player.
January 12th, 2004 at 5:46 am
There are quite a few applications that do what you want. They It basically encode whatever the soundcard is playing to an mp3 file. The good thing about sreamripper though is (a) better sound quality, and (b) splitting of songs.
Here are some of the options for generic audio recording (a quick google search would get you more): messer, Total Recorder, MP3 Recorder, etc.
January 23rd, 2004 at 10:23 am
wow, thanks for the info - tried stationripper and it’s really cool. the only problem is I’m running out of room for all this music!
-john