capturing streaming audio in linux

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

anyone have any magic spells for this?

[RoyGBiv]

1. Do you have MPlayer?

You can start it from the CLI with certain options, and it will capture the stream and save it to a filename you specify.

The trick is finding out the actual URL to the audio stream, i.e. not the URL for the webpage where it is, but the path to the actual stream. A lot of sites try to hide these. But, you'd have to find out the same thing regardless of the platform.

Anyway, once you know where the stream is, you can direct MPlayer to start it and redirect the output to a file. There are a couple ways to go about it.

The directions here: http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/archives/2004/09/25/howto-capture-streaming-audio-for-later/ are simple to follow and work if you're not too worried about efficiency.

[qnr]

2. That pretty much covers the basic way.. but -dumpfile is useful if you

want to capture more than one and you want to keep track of them. That would be: -dumpfile filename which outputs the filename instead of stream.dump

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

3. That seemed to work better than the way on the web

page, but it blows up and exits...

this seems to be the germane error line...

86 audio & 200 video codecs
Linux RTC init error in ioctl (rtc_irqp_set 1024): Permission denied
Try adding "echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq" to your system startup scripts.

[qnr]

4. Yeah, you should set yourself up to use the real-time clock, it's used

for timing.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

5. I wondered why. I saw a rtc flag setting

I will try that.

[Syrinx]

6. I do this sometimes to record Mike Malloy

mplayer -ao pcm -aofile /home/me/malloy.wav -vc null -vo null
http://play.rbn.com/?url=airam/airam/live/live.rm&proto=rtsp

(That should be all one line.)

The resulting WAV file is huge.  I really should pipe it
through lame in real-time.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

7. so, let me embarass myself here...

you would type that line and then what?

|./lame


or something like that?

[Syrinx]

8. yes, I think that's right

Pipe it through.  lame's probably not in your home directory,
but I'm not sure if that's a point or not.

You may have to supply some parameters, I'm not sure.

I'm never sure how to do something on a computer until I try
it a few times.  :D