Alternatives to Rhythmbox to record Streaming Audio

Question

I always have been able to record streaming radio using Rhythmbox, until now. As already reported, there is a bug with 13.04. I tried Banshee. There is also a bug with that, which has been reported. Is there any audio player out there that can record internet radio and make each song an .mp3?

I have tried VLC (can make one file as far as I can tell), Streamripper2, Clementine and Audacious. Streamripper2 works but does not have the stations I want. I really like 13.04, except for this issue. It is faster than 12.10 and 12.04 and I had no issues installing the video card driver, so my preference is to stay with 13.04.

I seem to have hit a dead end on various websites looking for an alternative. Does anyone have an idea? Much obliged!

Solution 1

Audio-recorder is exactly what you want.

From it's launchpad entry description:

This amazing program allows you to record your favourite music and audio to a file. It can record audio from your system's soundcard, microphones, browsers, webcams & more. Put simply; if it plays out of your loudspeakers you can record it.

Note that it does not record via a microphone or anything like that. Rather, it saves the data as it passes through your soundcard!

Audio-recorder is quite powerful. You can have it start/stop recording when audio data starts/stops flowing through your soundcard:

It has an advanced timer that can: * Start, stop or pause recording at a given clock time. * Start, stop or pause after a time period. * Stop when the recorded file size exceeds a limit. * Start recording on voice or sound (user can set the audio threshold). * Stop or pause recording on "silence" (user can set the audio threshold and delay).

Suppose you have Audio-recorder start/stop recording on sound/silence. If you leave an internet radio streaming all day, then at the end of the day each song will be saved to a separate file. (assuming consecutive songs are not "mixed")

Installation:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:osmoma/audio-recorder
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audio-recorder

Solution 2

Command line with ffmpeg / avconv

We can save internet audio streams to disk with the following commands:

ffmpeg -i <IP>:<port> <filename>.mp3
avconv -i <IP>:<port> <filename>.mp3

Replace <IP> with the Internet address of your station and <port> with the port they are streaming. The applications will convert the stream to any known format given by the resulting filename's extension (.mp3 will write mp3 files, .ogg will write Ogg Vorbis files).

Example for a recording of Gold FM Radio via internet.radio.com:

ffmpeg -i http://uk2.internet-radio.com:30092 recording.mp3

^{Radio station IPs and ports may change so the above link may not always work}

Comments

[jaxreiff]

Can it make individual mp3's like Rhythmbox? I was under the impression that Clementine and Amarok were quite similar. Thanks.

[Mitch]

What do you mean Make MP3's?

[jaxreiff]

Rhythmbox will make each song an individual mp3 with the Radio-Browser plugin. Banshee has a similar feature. VLC will record the entire stream into one file (as far as I can tell). Does Amarok do that?

[Mitch]

From what I read I think it can, but I can't verify 100%

[jaxreiff]

Thanks for getting back to me. I don't think that will make each song an individual mp3.

[jaxreiff]

Yes! Sorry for the delay responding.

[jaxreiff]

This program does not work with 14.04 LTS. This latest release has been a huge disappointment to me on so many levels. Ubuntu didn't do a great job this time around. Could this be an issue with audio-recorder? It worked well with 12.04.

[cmo]

it's not in the repository for 14.04? I'm sorry, I am not a pro with Ubuntu or Linux. Sounds like all the recent distribution versions are bad. I have 13.04 (raring) and it worked for me. I guess the owner of the repositroy, "osmoma", is responsible for keeping it up to date with 14.04. Maybe post an issue/ticket on the repository page

[jaxreiff]

I tend to think it is the program as I have the same issue with Opensuse 13.1 (I dual boot with Ubuntu). I gave Amarok a try. Not perfect, but it seems better than nothing.

[surfealokesea]

avconv works on ubuntu 14!