Aaron, at the St. Pete SLUG meeting last night, threw out a pretty
nice tip--at least, it was new to me.
The idea of capturing streaming shoutcast MP3 files is very cool.
First, you aren't going to get any letters from RIAA lawyers because
of doing this. And secondly, you can enjoy your music with much less
guilt, because unlike napster/kazaa/et al, the stations putting out
the streaming broadcasts have legally obtained the rights to do so.
Ok, not everybody cares about this, but if you do....
Aaron told us about RipCast. And I have found two other alternatives
and I've tried all three of them tonight.
RipCast is Windoze only, free to try, and costs about $15 after the
first 30MB of downloads. I registered after I ran out of free time,
but they haven't emailed my unlock code yet. Of the three choices I
tried, it's the prettiest and most polished.
If you want to go the free route, there's a Windows GPL program called
StreamRipper32. Go to:
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/sr32/
StreamRipper32 isn't quite as nice as RipCast, IMHO, but it does work
(for me anyway), and the price is right.
But here's the good part (third choice). There is a Linux choice! If
you go to:
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/srdownloads.php
Under "Older Versions" there's a Linux version. In fact, I THINK (but
am not sure) that they are keeping it up to date, as far as the
"innards" go, but it's "older version" moniker is because it's command
line.
You will have to compile this after downloading, but it's a piece of cake.
To use it, first set your Mozilla browser "helper" for .pls files to
XMMS. (or set whatever browser and audio player you use)
Browse to ShoutCast.com and find a station you like. Be sure to click
the little "Tune in!" button; don't click on the text.
As soon as you click, XMMS should open and start playing.
When you find a station you like, right click anywhere on the XMMS
player skin, and from the context menu, pick "View File Info". A
dialog window opens, with the URL right on top. Drag-select and copy
the URL.
Paste the URL into the command line in an xterm window, like:
streamripper <URL>
That's it! You can specify destination directory and other things in
the command line too.
Each method seems to work ok; it remains to be seen what bugs will appear.
John
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