How to save off streaming mp3 audio?
January 15, 2010 12:59 PM   Subscribe

I listen to quite a few podcasts on my laptop. These are all streaming mp3 playing through Windows Media Player, in Windows XP SP3. So once the entire stream has been loaded into 'memory', can it be saved to the hard drive without using another application? I could swear I saw an article somewhere claiming that you could go to the 'Run...' dialog and enter something that would save off the file. No admin rights so can't install anything. Thanks.
posted by mattholomew to Computers & Internet (8 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Windows Media Player is unlikely to make this convenient. VLC and mplayer on the other hand definitely make ways of doing this availible (including saving a stream to disk instead of listening to it). And they support more formats than WMP does.
posted by idiopath at 1:04 PM on January 15, 2010


An alternate tactic: for some streaming formats, you will download a playlist to open in WMP or another media player; generally, opening this playlist in a text editor will yield a download location for the actual file to be streamed.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 1:11 PM on January 15, 2010


Playing off of idiopath's suggestion. You could install the portable version of VLC on a USB drive and then use that to get the file.
posted by oddman at 1:27 PM on January 15, 2010


Response by poster: idiopath/oddman, thank you for the suggestions, but I should have clarified that I can't run any third party applications whether they're installed or not.
posted by mattholomew at 1:32 PM on January 15, 2010


mattholomew: “I could swear I saw an article somewhere claiming that you could go to the 'Run...' dialog and enter something that would save off the file.”

Well, I don't know exactly what the command was that did this, but it is possible.

When you're streaming media, and you do what you're talking about – wait for the entire stream to load – what's happening is that Windows Media Player is saving the file to a temporary files directory and playing it from there. What such a command would have to do would be to:

(1) Identify which file in which folder is the one being currently streamed.

(2) Copy that file to another folder so that it doesn't get automatically deleted as it usually would.

I am sadly not inclined to spend time trying to figure out how I would write that kind of command, partially because I think it'd probably be a waste of time and partially because scripting things in Windows is unfortunately not fun or easy, at least for me. Sorry.

However, I say 'it's a waste of time' because it would be so much easier for you just to do this via VLC. In fact, you don't really even need the portable version. As long as you can download stuff on your computer, you can download the "Windows zip package" here, unzip the folder, and just run VLC. No installation - or admin rights - required.

Once you've got VLC Player running, just follow this relatively good eHow walkthrough of the steps involved, and you can save the stream very easily.
posted by koeselitz at 1:48 PM on January 15, 2010


mattholomew: “idiopath/oddman, thank you for the suggestions, but I should have clarified that I can't run any third party applications whether they're installed or not.”

Ah.

Then this will probably be relatively difficult. I certainly can't imagine a short command that you'd run in the 'run' dialogue that would do this.

You can try doing this by hand, if you want: go to C:\Programs and Settings\Windows Media Player\ and look around to see if you can find a 'temp' folder. If you find one, then leave it open and try loading a new stream to see if a file appears there when you do. (Make the folder's window active and press F5 to reload it to check if anything's changed.) If you find the folder where Windows Media Player is saving those temporary files, then you could wait until they're just finished loading and then copy them elsewhere.

I haven't actually tried that, and I have a feeling it would actually be more difficult than what I'm describing. For one thing, I don't know if WMP tries to make those temp files hidden; I'll bet they do, in which case there will simply be no way for you to save the stream at all. (Hidden files aren't really available to people who aren't allowed to install applications, generally.) However, there's no harm in trying.
posted by koeselitz at 1:56 PM on January 15, 2010


mattholomew: “idiopath/oddman, thank you for the suggestions, but I should have clarified that I can't run any third party applications whether they're installed or not.”

You can download streams, but you can't run anything but registried applications? That sounds like a pretty strange and uncommon security setup. I'm only guessing, but I'll bet that you can run third party applications as long as they don't touch the registry - ie they're not installed. And if you can't, it seems odd that you'd be allowed to download streams at all.

In any case, I've looked around, and unfortunately there's really no other answer. No, there is no native utility in Windows which would allow you to save media streams. That makes sense - Windows hates the idea of letting you save streams, simply because it wants to sell streams as a way to prevent the end user from being able to save the file. I can imagine there might be a command that you could run that would do this – mencoder.exe notably springs to mind – but any command that did this would require installation of a non-native program.

Sorry. The above instructions about finding the 'temp' directory are going to be your only hope, I'm afraid. If you can't find it in the Windows Media Player directory, try looking in Internet Explorer's folders.
posted by koeselitz at 2:19 PM on January 15, 2010


Are these streams, or are they podcasts? They really aren't the same thing, though I'm sure the terms have blurred plenty. Do you have a couple URLs so we can check them out?

If they are streams, then there is just a stream of bits that WMP is receiving via any of a handfull of protocols (including HTTP), buffering in memory, playing back, and then overwriting to make room for more. You'll surely need additional software to capture part of the stream and save it to disk.

If they are really podcasts, then there are files somewhere that WMP is downloading loading over HTTP and playing back. WMP is streaming these files in so far as it probably starts playback before the whole file is loaded. Its been a number of versions since I tried, but it used to be that WMP you could "save" files played back this way to your disk using the "Save" option in the "File" menu. It may still be there, buried somewhere.

If that doesn't work, then you might be able to get "info" or "details" on the playing podcast, find the URL for the file, copy it and open it in a browser and save it to disk from there.
posted by Good Brain at 5:19 PM on January 15, 2010


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