so i like to listen to radio1 on the bbc. they stream through real player (which actually isn’t bad on the mac). but the kicker is that listening at work and home is fine. but what i really want is to listen on my ipod, during my commute.

but they only stream. there is a program called wiretap for the mac that will record whatever is coming from your speakers into an mp3 file. well, ok, but that means im listening as i record. kind of defeats the purpose. plus wiretap is 19 bucks.

and then i found streamrecorder. and, at the same time, found a page listing all the bbc streams — not just for radio1, but for everything they offer. very nice. (i havent dug for npr streams — they might already offer podcasts, making this whole process moot, but i wanted to point out that it isnt just bbc stuff that this works for.)

streamrecorder is simple — you drag a stream into the window, tell it what the tag is to be and it will stream it (silently), record it to a file, convert that file to an mp3 and add it to your itunes automatically. (once in there, get the info on the file and check the clickbox to ‘remember playback location’ so you can pick up exactly where you leave off.)

now, most of these shows are 2 hours long, so you need a bit of harddrive space (200 megs for fileplus temp space for processing it). but yesterday i recorded 3 shows. that’s 6 hours of music to listen to. that alone might be enough to get me through the week.

it is still somewhat manual, but something is way better than nothing. and i am sure with a little more time, i could whip up an automator script or something to grab this stuff automagically.

i don’t know any similar software for the pc though i am sure some exists. stream ripper is the only thing i can think of and i believe it disappeared years ago.

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