Record Multiple Internet Radio Stations

Recording Internet Radio for private use is legal in most countries. It is an excellent way to increase the own music collection legally in short time. You find several free and many paid applications on the Internet that offer to record Internet Radio but none that worked so well as the Stripper and Streamripper combination.

Stripper is a Java frontend for Streamripper that offers and easy to use interface with the option to add and record multiple Internet Radio stations simultaneously. Both applications are available for a variety of operating systems including Windows and Linux.

I would begin by installing Streamripper on the system. Stripper itself is a JAR file that can be executed without installation if the Java Runtime Environment is installed on the system. It asks for a few preferences at start, most notably the path to streamripper.exe and the path where the music should be saved in.

It's only a matter of finding a few Internet Radio stations where the moderators are not forced to talk into every song to prevent the clean recording. A good start is the Shoutcast directory which lists thousands of Internet Radio stations sorted by popularity and music genre.

The urls of the streams ending with .pls usually have to be copied and added as a new Stream in Stripper. A click on the record button starts the recording of that Internet Radio station.

I tested it with six simultaneous stations and it worked nicely. The limit seems to be the capacity of the user's Internet connection more than anything else.

The frontend provides stream specific settings. Users can change settings like the User Agent, proxy servers, the maximum file sizes and length of recordings and even schedule recordings to record their favorite radio show. Tags and other information are saved by default if the stream is sending those information.

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