Note to Software Developers

[fingertrouble]

I doubt if there are any here, but anyway. Spent ages trying to find a piece of sofware that will rip a internet radio stream, and there's two things that REALLY bug me about shareware/downloadable software:

1) I HATE crippleware (ie. a piece of software you're restricted to using it for X seconds or X Mb) as I've gone ahead and bought crippleware and then found it actually doesn't do what I wanted. Okay I may have wasted 20-30 dollars but still a bitch

2) They NEVER tell you on the site it's crippleware. If they KNOW as I supect that it's unpopular then why do it? If the likes of Adobe are happy to do time-limited trials then why can't you? So i download it, open it, go GAH then immediately scrub it's crap off my system. Waste of time. And one of them (Ministream Ripper, bag of TOTAL SHITE SOFTWARE I hope you check your referrals/Google alerts and read this) didn't tell me until I'd wasted 30 mins trying to rip the stream to be told AFTER and got an empty file. They WOULD have gotten my money but such underhanded dealings they won't get a cent from me.

I'm willing to pay for something that will do the job, but in this age of dodgy dealers I want to SEE it can do it first. I don't believe your empty claims on the website and the unreliable electrons they're painted on.

As it stands I'm using HiDownload to download the stream and RM to MP3 Converter. Wish me luck!

Nope RM to MP3 Converter can only do half length on trial and doesn't bother to tell you til you try . Total shit software. SCRUB!

Comments

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I dont bother with any of that stuff. I simply record the audio stream from the playback application using Audition (you can use any recording s/w here) saving it to whichever file format I like. No bastardware needed. Only bad thing is that one has to be around to start and stop the recording process.

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

Yeah but you do lose a lot of quality doing that, especially as the BBC INSIST on using crappy RealAudio, you don't want to lose any more in the analogue record.

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

Also you have to sit there in realtime and hope there's no transport problems with the feed = editing!

[blankbooks.livejournal.com]

How about Mplayer? Cross-platform open source. I think the command line to make it record a stream is "mplayer [stream url] -dumpstream -dumpfile [desired file name]" Should work assuming Mplayer can play the stream at all. VLC is another good one. Open-source, cross-platform and has a great stream/converter wizard built in.
Mplayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
VLC: http://www.videolan.org/
For all the good they'll do you now that you're in Spain and not giving two shits about computer stuff.
Happy whatevers to you and yours as well and thanks for the link to the game. That polar bear is awesome.