Realplayer streaming BBC to mp3 files
The BBC listen again facility allows you to play back audio broadcasts up to seven days after they originally air. That’s fine, unless you listen to most of your radio in the car, or away from your computer.
OK. So you can listen live, as long as you are in the UK, but sometimes I would like to listen to the last 3 episodes of Perelandra, and possibly find out what’s going on in Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World, while on a plane, or driving around Seattle.
This is where Mplayer, and the title of this blog entry come in.
The basic premise is to use mplayer to stream an entry to the harddrive in PCM format (wav), convert from wav to mp3 and drop in onto an mp3 file.
The following snippet from a larger script demonstrates the basic principle.
#Input: $1 url
# $2 name of file to record to (excluding extension)
#
mplayer -prefer-ipv4 -bandwidth 99999999 -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast -ao pcm:file=$2.wav $1
lame $2.wav $2.mp3
rm $2.wav
With a high bandwidth, it takes roughly a minute to download and encode a programme. Renaming or naming files are pretty tedious to do however, so I started to look at listing programmes, such as bleb and the BBC’s own backstage listings in order to automate the process. Continue reading…