Realtime Audio Conversion And Serving

Hobadee writes "First of all, Happy Christmas and Merry New Year! This year for Christmas, my dad and I decided to give my mom a Linksys WMLS11B. (Radio which can play MP3 streams) Since my mom listens to a lot of international news radio on the Internet, we figured this would be great so that she wouldn't have to sit at the computer all the time. The problem is that most of the stations she listens to are either RealMedia or Windows Audio streams, while the player only supports MP3 streams. (It claims to support WMA, but we haven't had any luck in our fiddling yet.) So here is the question: Would it be possible to get other types of files to play on the device? My idea is to have an intermediate server download, convert to MP3, and re-stream the files, but I'm not sure of the implementation. Would this be easily do-able with something like Icecast and Lame?"

Because there's no DRM

[tepples]

Publishers of commercial streams want to exclude people from downloading their streams. Unlike Windows Media Player and RealPlayer, MPEG-1 and Ogg (the most common containers for MP3 and Vorbis respectively) do not define a digital restrictions management layer. Thus, commercial publishers tend to shy away from MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. In addition, it is claimed that the MP3 royalty is greater than the Windows Media Player or RealPlayer royalty, and Ogg Vorbis doesn't have enough of an install base to be worth technicians' time.

I think it should work

[jmitchel!jmitchel.co]

IIRC (I don't have the computer I use for this handy), the magic piece of the puzzle is xine or mplayer and the 12 MBish windows codec pack. One or the other of these can read realaudio streams and transcode them to mp3 files. From there it's a matter of pushing the mp3 files out over shoutcast, or whatever the relevant stream format is, which will hopefully be fairly easy if the Linksys box plays shoutcast streams.

Re:Dude, you're gettin a Squeezebox!

[jtmas83]

I would also recommend SlimServer [slimdevices.com]...and I'm not a Slim employee!

I've been using SlimServer for at least 6 months now and I absolutely love it. I have it installed on one of my spare linux servers and can access my entire music library anywhere that has internet access and an mp3 player (I'm currently away for the Holidays and as I'm typing this very message I'm listening to my music stored hundreds of miles away). However, the beauty of it is that it should be able to do exactly what you want: it can connect to internet streams and do conversion on the fly. There are also a number of plugins available (for example, here [rtfm.info])

I should mention that I only use their software, SlimServer (which is free), and not their hardware unit, SqueezeBox. This is not because I'm a cheap bastard, but because I'm a college student living in a dorm room...you can't *not* be next to your computer in a dorm, so I have no use for something like SqueezeBox. However, once I move out next year, one of my first pruchases will be a SqueezeBox.

BlogMatrix Sparks records Real and WMP formats

[blogmatrix]

I've been working on BlogMatrix Sparks! [blogmatrix.com] for the last few months and it's definitely what this person is looking for:

• it's open source [sourceforge.net]
• can record most -- every one I've seen -- streaming radio formats (including Windows Media and Real Player)
• it runs as a native (GUI) app on Windows and Mac and (in the works) as a Python app on Linux
• it converts recorded programs into MP3s
• MP3s are optionally treated as Podcasts and stored in iTunes or Windows Media Player
• there's a searchable directory of thousands of radio stations. This is really important as many radio stations try to hide their recording URIs
• radio can be recorded now, once only at a particular time or on a repeating basis (i.e. weekly)
• programming information is encoded into URI fragments to allow programming to be shared amongst multiple users
• here's some (old) screenshots [blogmatrix.com]

Credit where credit is due: this is an integration project on top of MPlayer [mplayerhq.hu] and Lame [sourceforge.net]. Ongoing project news is in our blog [blogmatrix.com].

- David Janes