Heard about this from Call for Help. A shoutcast stream ripper called Stream Ripper. I thought the standalone program kinda sucked, but the plugin for Winamp is very cool. Maybe someone here would consider making a plugin for foobar.

You can't be serious. Why do you want to rip soutcas stream?

Ummm, the point of a high quality audio player is to play high quality audio.

If you want to rip on Foobar for not having your "neccesary" ripper of $hity audio streams, go on the Winamp forum and sing your praises of its plugin. How dare you claim to like Foobar (yes, you do, you want a plugin for it) yet have that annoying thread subject?

You all must be listening to the wrong stations, because there are plenty of good quality (at least as good as 85% of music on Kazaa et. al) streaming audio stations out there. In any event, there is no need to jump all over this guy's back...

I rarely rip streaming audio, but I think this is a good idea for a component, especially since the standalone Streamripper does suck. And since Peter added ICY metadata support to foo_read_inet, it probably wouldn't be hard at all to rework foo_diskwriter to write out individual songs, complete with metadata.

I use totalrecorder for my stream recording needs (BBC7 comedy shows streamed in realplayer format).
Of course I had to buy it though..

Streambox VCR is good for saving realplayer audio streams (it does lots of streaming video formats too).

Yeah, but it's not saved as the original RealAudio format. If you wanted to save size, you'd have to transcode, which is bad.

The reason I'm excided about this is because there are not many radio stations in my area and all of them are terrible. With StreamRipper I can rip a good station overnight and bring it with me the next day. As far as quality goes for streaming audio, I don't have great ears and find a 128kbps stream to be exceptable in most cases.

IMNSHO, when properly encoded, 128kbps shouldn't have any noticable artifacting (assuming quality-based ABR, of course). It should just chop off enough high-frequency to decrease the bitrate.

What the fuck?
It seemed like a perfectly acceptable request to me.. infact, it seems like something that would be genuinely useful. There are shoutcast stations out there that broadcast at decent bitrates, you know.


That is perhaps the funniest thing I have read all week. Thanks for that.
(I'm not laughing with you, btw.)

I see deaf people.

This is true but for my purposes not an issue - I'm basically recording speech radio shows to listen to later and then delete. I record to Ogg -q 1 which gets me a half hour show in about 20Mb.

I can see that if I was trying to record music from the streams then the transcoding might be noticeable but if I was actually going as low as recording RealPlayer streams to get my music I probably wouldn't be to bothered by that kind of error (there are already major artifacts in RP streams of music as it is).