Looking for software to aid with streaming via an unreliable connection

October 10, 2012 10:01 PM

Is there a music streaming program that will continuously cache a stream while a connection is available and play from that cache on demand, in a first-in-first-out manner?

I'm interested in all platforms with the following order of preference: iOS, OS X, *nix CLI, Windows, *nix GUI.

The less babysitting required, the better.

I'm OK with a complicated config.

posted by Nameless to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Are you looking for something to cache an arbitrary stream (like a shoutcast station such as somafm)? Or something with it's own "music ecosystem" such as pandora or last.fm but with caching?

for #2, both Slacker and Spotify (both are on iOS/OSX) support caching. You may have to pay for caching on Spotify on iOS (it used to be in the premium service only but I think they changed it). Also, you can save Pandora streams to .mp3 files with Saver2 (Windows only unfortunately, if there is a solution for *nix I'd love to hear about it).

For caching shoutcast stations, I like streamripper (unix cli). You can rip each track to a separate mp3 and give them a track # in the id3 tag, or you can split based on period of time -- such as station1_hour1.mp3, station1_hour2.mp3, etc. I think you can just have one big mp3 file if you want, but I've never done that (I usually rip these stations for a period of several weeks and mp3s of that size will choke a lot of players). Beware that the vast majority of shoutcast stations (including soma.fm and di.fm) crossfade their music, so if you do individual tracks, they have to be played in order, or they won't sound right.

And if you do rip somafm or another non-commercial and donation-supported service, please donate to them.
posted by robokevin at 5:46 AM on October 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I'm looking for the streaming of arbitrary streams. I'm already aware of Streamripper, but that's not what I'm looking for. Thank you for your suggestions.
posted by Nameless at 10:30 AM on October 11, 2012