How do I record a 13-hr Internet radio show?

March 24, 2009 7:17 PM

Radio Station WUMB is having a Bob Dylan Day tomorrow, playing covers of his music from 6 am to 7pm! The problem is I'll be away from my PC for most of the time. What's the simplest and best way to record it? WUMB broadcasts streaming audio over the Net (wumb.org)
posted by storybored to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

There are loads of options for recording streaming audio, and the variety of formats WUMB provide should make it relatively easy.

However, given that you are recording such a long broadcast, and you will be away from your computer, I might recommend installing the Orb. It is a bit of overkill, since it's an entire remote media server, ie. access your music and videos from anywhere kind of deal - but it does have an extremely useful feature to schedule radio recordings. You could set it to slice the broadcast into hour-long MP3 files, for example.

The radio station URL you should give Orb is http://www.live365.com/play/wumb919
posted by Jimbob at 7:22 PM on March 24, 2009

Best answer: For what it's worth, going to http://www.live365.com/play/wumb919fast (or more directly to
http://216.235.81.102:15442) gives me a file save dialog for a 56 kbps MP3 of their live stream.

If you've got browser associations which load that directly into a media program of some sort, then dropping the URL directly into a vanilla download manager should work, I'd assume. I think 13 hours will be around 400 mb.
posted by aiko at 7:52 PM on March 24, 2009

Streamripper works well as long as you have a stable Internet connection.
posted by qvtqht at 7:55 PM on March 24, 2009

Response by poster: Aiko: thanks for that. I'm using Firefox and as you said the page brought up a "save file dialog". Terrific! One thing which is very puzzling though is that if I stop the saving and then reload that page, Firefox automatically brings up a Quicktime plug-in. It no longer offers me the "Save file" option. What gives?! Do you know why this happens? Fortunately, I restarted Firefox and was able to get the option offered to me again, so I am now recording Dylan as we speak.

Jimbob: thanks for your suggestion of Orb. I downloaded yesterday and set it up to do a 'scheduled recording'. Unfortunately, when i got up today, it looked like my DSL had dropped during the night, so the recording didn't start. I started it manually but sadly it doesn't seem to have a progress indicator. I didn't know whether the recording was working or not. So I monitored the size of recording file. The file grew from 0 up to 23 MB and then stopped. Orb didn't give any error messages. I restarted the recording and this time it stopped after 1.8 Mb, again no error messages. Maybe I'm missing something. Anyhow I decided to try Aiko's method and so far it looks okay....

qvtqht: Thanks for the Streamripper suggestion. I poked around and found Stationripper also. I've downloaded it and will try it out later on.
posted by storybored at 7:02 AM on March 25, 2009