ESP is a software program that combines both concepts. It makes use of the Shoutcast directory of Internet Radios that the user can listen to online. It provides the means to record the active stream right away. Other applications that handle this well are Streamripper, Musicy and several music players like AIMP2 or XMPlay.

ESP would not be special in this regard if it would not offer a more or less unique feature in addition to being able to record Internet Radio. The software can automatically search for music that has been publicly made available by the artist or the record company. The developers say that ESP looks only for music that has been uploaded by the artist to social networking websites. The software itself will not display the source of the music download which could be reason enough for cautious users to not use the feature. Tests revealed that it pulled songs from websites like MySpace.

ESP is available for most Windows operating systems including Windows 98, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Related posts

• The best way to record Internet Radio streams (10)
• Record Multiple Internet Radio Stations (7)
• How To Record Internet Radio With AIMP2 (4)
• Using Streamripper to save Internet Radio tracks (11)
• AutoLyrix Automatically Displays Lyrics And Album Art (12)

The first step is to find an Internet radio station. The Shoutcast directory should provide something for every music taste on the planet. A simple click on Tune In should load the stream in AIMP2 if it is configured to play the playlist files of Internet radio. Since we have to configure one setting in the music player’s option anyway I show you how to make AIMP2 the default player for the playlist files first. Once that is done we are going to configure the options to save Internet radio in a proper format and select a directory on the hard drive.

Pressing [CTRL P] after starting AIMP2 will open the player’s options. Selecting the Associations entry under System will bring up the various compatible file types the player can play. If AIMP2 is your default player you can simple click on the Enable All button to associate all file types with AIMP2. The important file type for Internet radio is .pls which you find at the bottom.

AIMP2 should now start playing the Internet radio whenever you click on a link that leads to an Internet radio playlist. Now head over to the Streaming menu under Player.

You have to pick a folder where the music from the Internet radio station will be saved in. A directory of the data will automatically be added in the root directory. The second option is about the format of the recorded music. The default is wave which takes up lots of space on the hard drive. A better option would be to select mp3 as the format. Either 192 or 256 Kbit should be good choices. Other choices are ogg or flac.

Now that the settings have been made it is time to start the recording. The recording option is only available in the main client and not in the minimal client. You can start the recording by clicking on Radio Cap on the left side of the player. A blinking text indicates that the player is recoding the music.

Users who would like to record more than one station at a time might want to take a look at Streamripper instead.

Related posts

• Record MP3 Streams with Screamer Radio (0)
• Winamp 5.5 lite vs. XMPlay Memory Management (13)
• Using Streamripper to save Internet Radio tracks (11)
• Trout Is A Lightweight Free Music Player (2)
• The best way to record Internet Radio streams (10)

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.

Related posts

• Record MP3 Streams with Screamer Radio (0)
• MP3 Music Downloads With ESP (1)
• Using Streamripper to save Internet Radio tracks (11)
• The best way to record Internet Radio streams (10)
• Screamer Radio (6)

Thus, all those Internet Radio saving applications like Raima Radio, Stationripper or Phonostar have not made it into the final round. I also did not want to use huge media clients such as Windows Media Player that would simply suck up to many resources. What I wanted was a lightweight music player with the capability of recording Internet Radio streams.

I did find it. XMPlay is the client that is lightweight and is able to record Internet Radio streams. XMPlay uses just 6.8 Megabytes of Ram when playing high-quality Internet Radio which is as lightweight as it can get.

The function to record Internet Radio is already implemented and can be accessed by simply right-clicking the stream url in the music player and selecting ‘Write to Disk’ from the menu. This saves the stream from that point on until you stop the recording.

It is possible to record the stream as one huge mp3 file or save individual tracks which is probably the better and organized way to record Internet Radio.

The only reason why I would choose another application would be if I wanted to schedule a recording or record more than one station at a time. Raima Radio would be the software of my choice if I wanted to do any of the above mentioned tasks.

Read More:

XMPlay
Raima Radio

Related posts

• MP3 Music Downloads With ESP (1)
• How To Record Internet Radio With AIMP2 (4)
• Winamp Auto Tagger (8)
• Using Streamripper to save Internet Radio tracks (11)
• Set Global Shortcuts for your Music Player (3)

The tools main features are:

Record Shoutcast Audio and Video streams, and Podcasts
Records up to 600 streams at one time
Auto-download Album art

Integrate with iTunes – auto-generate iTunes playlists of songs recorded.
Keeps track of the songs you’ve already recorded, only keeping the songs you don’t already have.

Lots more on the official homepage that I posted above. The authors claim that they´ve been able to download more than 2000 songs in a period of 3,5 hours recording multiple streams at once. Just add your favorite stations from shoutcast.com and give it a try.

[tags]record, audio streams, shoucast, podcast, mp3 stream, save audio stream, rip, ripper, streamripper, stationripper[/tags]

Related posts

• The best way to record Internet Radio streams (10)
• Screamer Radio (6)
• Record Multiple Internet Radio Stations (7)
• MP3 Music Downloads With ESP (1)
• How To Record iTunes Radio (4)

[tags]mp3, ogg, wma, record radio, internet radio, live streams, streams[/tags]

Related posts

• Record MP3 Streams with Screamer Radio (0)
• Record Multiple Internet Radio Stations (7)
• How To Record Internet Radio With AIMP2 (4)
• The best way to record Internet Radio streams (10)
• Stationripper Record Internet Radio Streams (3)