FM no longer has the biggest selection of radio stations. Instead, you need an Internet connection. But how can you save a copy of your favorite web broadcast?
The Internet has given birth to a new generation of “radio hams” who employ webcasting or streaming to deliver programming to Internet listeners using a variety of protocols. The innumerable radio stations at Shoutcast.com use the MP3 format for webcasting, whereas traditional radio stations tend to use the RTSP or PNM protocol, as spoken by RealPlayer, or the MMS protocol, as spoken by MPlayer. Unfortunately, recording the data from an incoming audio stream involves some extra work. Stream Me Up! Radio stations that use the MP3 format are the easiest to record. Streamripper [1] supports recording of MP3 streams, such as those found at Shoutcast.com or Icecast.org. The Streamtuner [2] GUI supports simultaneous recording and playing and gives users some convenient management features (Figure 1). Both programs can typically be installed using the package management tools provided by the major distributions. Fedora users may need to install the xmms-mp3 package [3]. Note that both Fedora Core 3 and Suse 9.3 no longer have the MP3 codec on board by default.
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