There’s no shortage of internet radio channels/bedroom producers peddling their wares on the internet.
How many of these do you have open access to? Well, that all depends on how the music is streamed. Some, such as Flash players (such as those favoured by myspace) make it difficult to record. Around the most accessible are Shoutcast streams. A Shoutcast server essentially just streams mp3′s via the common m3u format (a simple text file that just tells your music player where to get the sound from). The advantage of this approach is that you can get rippers that will just access the stream directly, and if each mp3 is tagged, will just dump the individual mp3′s into and directory you wish.
Finding rippers
I can personally recommend Castripper as I’ve been using this refreshingly small piece of software for the last couple of weeks.
All you do is tell it the address of the stream you want to record (the easiest way of getting this is by opening the stream in iTunes and looking at the properties), where you want to save it, and whether you want to divide the stream up – eg. by song.
And then let it rip.
For this simplicity you lose the ability to save the stream name and locations for future use, as well as the ability to schedule recordings, but why not just keep things simple anyway?
More recently, I’ve come across All Streaming Media which lists a number of Shoutcast rippers, as well as tools to record just about every type of multimedia format. Not the easiest site to navigate, but there’s a lot of information there.
