Linux Multimedia Hacks

Rip Streaming Audio

Streamripper lets you rip the live streaming audio station of your choice directly to MP3 for later listening.

Streaming audio has allowed a number of people to easily broadcast not only their favorite music tracks, but also other types of radio shows. Instead of being broadcast all day long, some shows are broadcast only at certain times of the day. If you aren’t at your computer when the show is broadcast you’ll miss out—unless you have streamripper.

streamripper is a simple but powerful command-line application that allows you to record streaming audio directly to local MP3 files. To install streamripper, see if your distribution has already packaged it, otherwise download the source from the official page at http://streamripper.sourceforge.net and compile and install it according to the installation instructions.

To use streamripper, simply pass it the URL to your streaming audio station in a console window:

	$ streamripper http://69.56.219.92:8072

By default, streamripper will create a directory named after the stream in the current directory and then start storing the streaming content as MP3s within an incoming directory. When a file is complete, streamripper will move it up from the incoming directory to the stream’s main directory. Each file is named after the artist and track metadata that streamripper grabs from the audio stream. You can leave streamripper running as long as you wish (provided you have enough hard drive space), and it will continue to grab ...