Recording

Most stations that stream MP3 or OGG music can be recorded. This is accomplished through the command-line tool streamripper. If you select a station and press ● record, a console window should appear, where streamripper shows its progress.

You can configure the recording tool according to audio types again. Usually you want to use the %srv placeholder. For the common case of a fixed destination, set the Recording output directory field in the settings dialog and keep %recdir in the recording command.

Streamripper

There's already a default entry for recording radio stations:

Format

Application

audio/*

xterm -e "streamripper %srv -d %recdir"

Streamripper has a few more options of its own:

  1. To use the directory from the settings dialog:

    • xterm -e "streamripper %srv -d %recdir"

  2. Use a specific filename pattern:

    • xterm -e "streamripper --xs2 -D '%S-%A-%T-%a.mp3' -d %recdir %srv"

  3. Just record a continuous stream, for 1 hour, without splitting individual songs from a radio station:

    • xterm -e "streamripper -A -s 3600 -d %recdir %srv"

  4. Pretend to be an audio player (in case recording is blocked):

    • streamripper -u 'WinampMPEG/5.0' %srv

If %recdir is present but the Recording output directory field is empty, the recording command is not started.

Whenever you leave out the xterm prefix, it runs silently in the background. Common xterm alternatives are x-terminal-emulator, or rxvt, gnome-terminal, and xfce4-terminal etc.

See the streamripper(1) man page or its FAQ for more tips.

fIcy/fPls

As alternative to streamripper, check out fIcy/fPls for recording ICEcast/SHOUTcast streaming servers.

It can be configured just as easily with:

  1. xterm -e "fPls %pls"

Graphical stream recording tools

You can also try a streamripper GUI or graphical reimplementation:

  • StreamRipStar (Java), works best per drag and drop; set the DND format to PLS or M3U however.

  • Streamtastic (Java), only imports a text entry per drag and drop.

  • KStreamRipper, though no current version in distros.

  • VLC has built-in recording capabilities.

Which all simplify defining a custom download directory, or how radio streams are split (between advertisement breaks), and the naming scheme for resulting *.mp3 filenames of course.

Youtube-DL

The recording settings already have a specific entry for "video/youtube" URLs.

To configure a custom download directory, either use the global Recording output directory setting with yt-dlp -P %recdir %srv, or define a custom command such as:

  1. xterm -e "yt-dlp -P %recdir %srv"

The cd trick also works with streamripper, or other tools.

Wget for MOD files

To download audio files from The MOD Archive directly, you can also define a custom handler.

  1. Scroll/click on the ⎘ empty row in the recording application list.

  2. There create a new recording MIME type:

    • audio/mod+zip

  3. Specifiy a command like:

    • xterm -e wget %srv

    • cd ~/Desktop ; wget %srv

    • curl %srv

All MOD file formats (IT, XM, S3M, etc.) are mapped to this generic type specifier.