Streamripper on Fedora 20

I live in a desert oasis, right behind a huge radio tower, yet the only radio station that I can reliably pick up is Abu Dhabi Classic, which I guess comes from this stupid tower. That gets rather trying after a while. The internet connection at home is fibre - everything comes over that - TV and net. Therefore, to get something to listen to in my car, I record internet radio streams onto a USB stick using streamripper.

Streamripper works like magic. It somehow avoids recording commercials (well, at least, the vast majority of them) and it will not save the same song multiple times. The main problem with it is getting the stream descriptors into a working format. I used to use streamtuner as my interface to the network radios and it includes streamripper, so the combination was perfect. Lately however, streamtuner doesn't work and I am too lazy to fix it myself. (Update: I got streamtuner to work using a special RPM made by a kind soul on http://forums.fedoraforum.org. The problems are due to missing Python libraries in the spec file).

# yum install streamripper -y

So, now I play music with iTunes on my Mac, make a playlist of the most palateable radio stations and then export the playlist to m3u (select m3u in a dropdown), then copy and paste the URLs into a script for streamripper, something like this:

#! /bin/bash
cd /home/herman/Music
streamripper http://begoodradio.com/itunes/rockmix.pls &
streamripper http://www.radioparadise.com/musiclinks/rp_128aac.m3u &
streamripper http://www.radiogothic.net/play/radiogothic128.m3u &
streamripper http://kocka.limemedia.cz:8000/blanikcz128.mp3 &

and leave it running for a couple of days in a Fedora 20 virtual machine on the Mac. Obviously, the more streams you rip in parallel, the faster your collection will grow and it is easy to get ten of them going simultaneously. In one hour, you can amass music for a fade free cross country trip.

The result is an eclectic mix of music, enough for a year of ordinary driving around, before it drives me nuts again.

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