Recording streaming audio 1141

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Robert Glueck

Pardon for replying to an older thread, but I was googling on streamtuner and streamplayer, and this was a useful post.

Ah, I was having a tad of difficulty seeing the relation between streamripper and streamtuner. At first I thought that they were "competing" programs, but, of course, their *names* quite succintly differentiate the two apps :)

Right now I'm using xmms to listen to shoutcast, but it's very awkward and, I suspect, a tad hit and miss. I suppose the corporatations goal is for all streaming media to use DRM, to make a buck, but that sucks for the user-consumer.

It seems that a suite of apps is needed for streaming audio (or media, in general), podcast aggregators, mp3 encoder, etc, etc. My portable player only plays mp3's, not ogg's, so, until I get a new player I want to put everything into mp3 automagically (which adds slightly to the complexity).

The holy grail in this respect, for me, would a single app to do the above. However, others prefer lotsa little apps. That is, all "media" capture, aggregation, conversion and so on. Media meaning sound or video? The definition for "media" could get murky, are pdf's included, html, flash, etc...?

Now, mplayer, I think, can be used as a standalone app for listening to mp3's. Also, mplayer can listen to streaming media, or rip (?) streaming media to the hard drive. And, mplayer can act as a plug-in for firefox, which is nice.

I'm just installing streamplayer with yum, and I notice that bmp (beep media player?) is also being installed. Given that bmp is a fork of xmms, that's more duplication and seeming unnecesarry complication.

streamplayer loads bmp, which gives an error when trying to play a shoucast stream. Neither can streamplayer record, hitting the record button for a shoutcast generates the following error:

xterm: Can't execvp streamripper: No such file or directory Sun Mar 19 05:02:25 EST 2006

The error generated by bmp is a pop-up dialog saying that

Error

Unable to play files.

The following files could not be played. Please check that: 1. they are accessible. 2. you have enabled the media plugins required.

However, I'm listening to that stream on xmms, clicking on "file info" from the playlist gives:

Input plugin: MPEG Layer 1-2-3 Placeholder Plugin

So, somewhere, the codecs exist for that stream. An mp3 stream?

It's not that eventually I won't get this to work, I'm just not understanding *why* it's not working out of the box, so to speak.

Even mplayer was hit and miss, so I was looking for something to do it all. The interface for streamplayer indicates that it can do alot, but I'm not seeing why I now have yet another media. I've already gone through the trouble of configuring xmms. I imagine that streamplayer can be made to work with xmms rather than bmp, but why?

I appreciate the logic of one app which does one thing well, but for media *playing* I'd like to see some master program which pulls them all together, or at least the GPL ones.

Or, am I just going about this, if not "wrong," then sub-optimally?

Well, now I'm noticing that while installing streamplayer also installed bmp, streamripper was never explicitly installed, so perhaps that's the error. As streamplayer depends, to an extent, on streamripper, I'm not seeing why either yum didn't install it as dependancy or bundle streamripper with streamplayer. Of course, someone might want streamripper by itself, but I think it's fair to buttume that if one wants streamplayer that streamripper is also wanted. Streamplayer without streamripper is of lessened utility, and a yum search for streamripper came up empty, anyhow.

Some of these annoyances, and that's all it is, are distro-yum related, but others cut across distributions. Of course, it's largely due to corporate battles between real, microsoft, apple, etc, but surely there's a work around for that nonsense which isn't a PITA? Or, not?

-Thufir