capturing CBC Radio from an internet stream

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Eric Battersby <gyre-Ja3L+HSX0kI at public.gmane.org>

| On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

| > Originally this worked fine.  Perhaps a year later, it seemed to often
| > stop about 30 or 40 minutes in.  Which was annoying.
| 
| Did it hang or stop?
| If it stopped, why not loop the code to continue capturing, as
| a backup?

It stopped.  A loop might work.  With gaps, I assume.  Probably no
"history".

| > What do you mean by "history"?
| 
| I ran the capture for 15s real time, but got 36s of data.
| If I immediately rerun the capture, the first 20s would be duplicated.

Interesting phenomenon.  Interesting term for this.

| > You mean capture the radio all the time?  That seems a bit rude:
| > wasting CBC's bandwidth for no good reason.  It would waste disk space
| > too unless I threw it away regularly (which proves that the bandwidth
| > was wasted).
| 
| That is a good point, but how wasteful is it really?
| I mean large corporations and their servers must expect lots
| of "hits" to their live feed,
| with many people continuously listening to their station.

This approach is does not matter when there are only a few folks that
do this.  It doesn't scale.  Not really "fair" to put that load on
their server.

| It "wastes" disk space, but you just remove files after N days.
| 
| The other choice is to record live from air, direct to digital.
| My MP3 player can do that, and save the result as WAV, but
| this is not so convenient as I have to leave it on before
| the show I want.

I bought a cheap USB tuner but it has no Linux support.

To be honest, I have too much to listent to, so missing what I don't
know about is a Good Thing.

| > The sound is bad enough.  I don't wish to make it worse.  So I would
| > have to use a high mp3 bitrate.  Then I would waste disk space.  And
| > waste flash memory in the player.
| > 
| > I admit that this is theory.  I haven't tested.  But there is only one
| > way for sound to come out through a lossy codec: worse.
| 
| I listened to the MP3 files converted from WMA and they were not bad.
| The high bit rate was not needed; 64 kbps was fine.

Interesting.

| > | Also, I don't like MP3 files longer than 10m because
| > | many MP3 players do not have a "very very fast-forward", nor
| > | a rewind into the end of the previous track.
| > 
| > I've yet to deal with this.  My preferred players have an option to
| > resume where they left off.  This is mostly good enough.
| 
| "Resume" is a fairly common standard.
| The problem is with clumsy fingers or being jostled.
| You want to rewind or fast forward a little, so you try to hold the
| ">>" or "<<" button, but you accidently tap the button instead.  Now
| you at the start of a track, instead of the middle.
| Getting back to where you were can be time consuming.

I certainly agree.  That's what the "mostly" was about.

| > I intend to try RockBox.
| 
| Why is this better than using a USM MP3 player, if you have a choice?
| Are you hacking it get it to work or to do something more?

Open source means, in theory, that you can make it do what you want.

| I don't bother with those "pay" DRM players.

All new players that I've looked into have DRM.

| I am now using an MPIO ML200 (2GB) player and am fairly satisfied
| with it.  I copy MP3 files thru the USB port.
| Yes, some older players even had more features.
| The best one I had was the RioVolt SP250 MP3/CD player.

The MPIO has no PaysForSure?

| Are you using PlayForSure or other commercial service?
| Do you need that?

No.
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