Mac People: Saving Air America Stream to CD or iPod

For those of us not lucky enough to have Air America on a radio station, Clever Husband has found a program to save Franken, Rhodes, Garafalo, et al to computer, and from there to CD or iPod.

First, you need to have Mac OS X (specifically OS 10.2.6 or better).

The program is called iRecordMusic and it's down loadable from bitcartel.com

Cost is $20, but the trial version is full-featured, just stops
recording after 15 minutes.

You also need to download the latest (free) version of RealPlayer to record AA.

In practice, iRecordMusic works like a browser. You open it,
navigate to Air America's homepage, click on "listen live" and Real Player opens in a browser-like window and begins playing the stream.

In the corner of the window is a blue button - click on it, and the
stream starts recording, giving you a chance to name it.

You need some space. My experience is that it requires about a
megabyte of space per minute of recording - so recording three hours of Franken takes about 180 megabytes of hard drive space. (equivalent to less than a third of the capacity of a standard CD).

Once the recording is stopped, (by clicking the button again) the
program uses Mac OS X's built-in iTunes program to encode it.

From that point, you can download it to an iPod, you can play it directly from your computer, or you can transfer it to CD and play it on any CD player that can play the MP3 format.

The program also integrates with Apple's iCal calendar program to allow unattended recording, but I haven't gotten that working
flawlessly yet - I think part of the problem is the early-days
flakiness of the Air America stream that breaks the scheduled
recording.

Now, I'm off to feed the puppies, accompanied by my iPod and Randi Rhodes from yesterday. :)

I have avoided getting RealPlayer because, once you load their program, they blast you with ads for their own and other products. There is fortunately an alternative - specifically called Real Alternative. Go to this web page:

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.edskes/finalbuilds.htm

Look for "Real Alternative." It combines the "Media Player Classic," a non-fancy player program very similar to the original Windows Media Player, and codecs and things that will play most RealMedia content. You have one tricky part; you have to point the web page part to where your web program is, and the program gives you hints for that.

I can testify that the program plays AirAmerica and a lot of other Real content with "unReal" quality.

While you're there, you can also get "QuickTime Alternative," which does the same for QuickTime (which I admit I haven't tried yet). At this point, I don't know if the author is preparing something similar for the Mac. (Just so you know, I have both flavors of machine.)

Check out Replay Radio..it's not perfect, but it works really well, and makes the MP3 automatically.

http://www.pctip.ch/downloads/dl/24171.asp

It installs links to a number of versions (current and earlier), which was kind of confusing. Use the latest (Streambox vcr 1.0 beta 31smf + turbo). Use the AirAmerica RM link (http://play.rbn.com/?url=airam/airam/live/live.rm&proto=rtsp) - unfortunately it archives to an RM file, but also included is a conversion program for RM to MP3 (Streambox Ripper 2.009).

And an example of using it:

http://www.why-war.com/guides/2003/06/realaudio.html