Schedule Streaming Audio Recordings in Ubuntu

Step 5 You're in Business!

That's all there is to it, to test your handiwork you can right click the streamrecord job in Kcron, choose 'run now' and check for mystream.wav in your /tmp directory. If it's there (and growing fast), run the pkill job and you should soon see the mystream.wav disappear from your /tmp directory, and a new .mp3 file in the directory you specified when you altered the script. If you're recording a long show, keep in mind that it will take a decent amount of time to encode your .wav file. On one 3 hour show I record, it takes approximately 10 minutes to encode to mp3. If you have any problems getting this to work, feel free to drop me a line.


Stuff

P.S. I know my methods are a bit crude, as there are probably best-practices that I'm not following in some of my steps, so please don't school me on Linux 101, this is just a quick and dirty way to never miss your favorite audio stream.

Comments

[bdbull]

I'm using this to record a 4.5 hour talk radio show from a radio station's internet stream. However, for some reason it's not getting the whole show. So far of 5 recordings this week, none of them recorded the entire show and they are all different file lengths.

[stuffman]

I've found that availability of the stream will affect whether or not you can establish and maintain a connection to the server. If your connection or the stream drops or becomes overwhelmed with requests that can happen, and this script will sense that the mplayer process has stopped, and move along to the next function, which is to encode what was just captured using Lame. The fact that all the files are of a different size makes me think that's whats going on. If you get a chance try listening to the stream live and see how reliable the stream is. You may be able to contact the person running the stream and ask that your IP be added to the whitelist, which will give your requests priority over everyone not on the list. Good Luck, Shawn

[frenchie]

Hi, really useful tutorial, thanks a lot. I'm having a strange problem with it though. The script to record the stream runs fine when I run it from the command line, but if I try to run it automatically from the crontab, mplayer crashes every time! MPlayer interrupted by signal 13 in module: play_audio - MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen. The script is identical, permissions are the same, I don't understand!! Thanks, John.

[stuffman]

I was able to run it without problems, are you using 'crontab -e' to edit your crontab? I'm not too familiar with that, but did have it working at one time. I did it once, went "well, this is a pain" and found kcron. There are native gnome apps to do the same, but kcron works great, so that's what I went with.

What stream are you accessing? I have no problems getting to a local radio station, that stream is encoded as an asf. How exactly are you invoking this stream from the command line? I tried this:

cd /scripts
sh streamrecord

and it worked fine, then tried it in kcron using 'run now' command, and again had no problems. Please try again to manually launch the script and see if you can get it to fail. I'm more interested in launching the actual script, not just

mplayer url.

Let me know if this sheds any light on your problem. Thanks,

Shawn

[frenchie]

Managed to track down the problem. Yes, I'm using crontab -e to edit the crontab (originally tried kcron and it didn't work there either). My crontab entry originally looked something like this:

03 00 * * 2-6 script URL filename

I edited it to redirect output/error messages like so:

03 00 * * 2-6 script URL filename > $HOME/logfile 2>&1

Now it works just fine! By the way, there's some useful info here that I've used together with your how-to in order to record directly to ogg/mp3 without creating a temporary wav file: http://www.tomtaylor.co.uk/blog/2007/04/17/play-it-again/

Thanks again, it's so cool to be able to record streams automatically.
John.

[frenchie]

You may have already tried this, but if your mp3 player doesn't support ogg natively, maybe this could help: Rockbox. It's an open-source alternative to the factory firmware, and it supports several models of mp3 player. Anyway, the lame conversion works just fine too.

Looking forward to listening to the radio show tomorrow that will be recorded while I snooze tonight!

all the best,
john.

[stuffman]

Great, I'm glad it's working for you. Sounds like I could learn a few things about Linux from you as well. For some reason, I thought mplayer could encode natively to .ogg format. In fact I remember finding to my dismay that my mp3 player wouldn't handle .ogg files, and therefore I had to add the conversion step with lame to go to mp3. Maybe not. Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad this is logged so I can refer back to your piping-to-a-logfile tip. Happy Thanksgiving! Shawn

[stuffman]

what release are you running? This instructable was based off of feisty, but I'm running gutsy now, so I'll see if I have similar results and get back to you. Shawn