Recording Streaming Audio for later listening
Posted on May 17, 2005, by Conor, under Uncategorized.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to record streaming audio so I can listen to it later (and start/stop when I like). Actually it’s specifically for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Quandary Phase. I didn’t really enjoy the last radio series and the repeats of the TV series aren’t that great either. But it became a technical challenge that I wanted to get to the bottom of. I finally cracked it today. Note that the solution below will not work behind some corporate firewalls but seems to work fine on my NATed setup on a Linksys Wireless Router at home.
Download MPlayer for Windows and all the codecs.
http://www2.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-beta/MPlayer-mingw32-1.0pre7.zip
http://www2.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/windows-all-20050412.zip
Unzip MPlayer and unzip the codecs.Copy the unzipped codecs to the codecs sub-dir of the mplayer dir.
Open a command prompt in the Mplayer dir and type:
mplayer -dumpfile hitchhikers.ra -dumpstream rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/hitchhikers.ra
It streams in realtime so it’ll take 30 mins to download.
Listen to ram file later at your leisure using realplayer (or the nifty stripped down, bloat-free Real Alternative)
Do that once a week to get each new episode.
Don’t try this with VLC. I spent ages trying to get it to work before I realised it doesn’t support realaudio!
RTE Radio Show Downloads » Conor’s Bandon Blog on April 20, 2006
[...] [3] You can’t actually download the files for later listening, you have to listen to them in realtime on your computer. This is the same stupid limitation set by BBC radio which I found a solution for when I wanted to grab the H2G2 broadcasts from last year. Follow my instructions over at this post (mainly to do with setting up MPlayer), find out when the programme you want was broadcast e.g. February 18th and then download it using MPlayer using a command line in a DOS prompt like the following: [...]