recording DAB radio stations

bat999

zippy75 wrote: »

Was that right?

Zippy

Yes, that sounds right. My SMPlayer might be an older version than yours.

Right, we'll download a short radio programme.

Open SMPlayer, Open > URL
Then copy and paste this URL and click OK

rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/religion/sun0543.ra

Nothing much will happen with SMPlayer but a new file will appear on your hard drive after a few minutes.
The name of the file is stream.dump and it's 1.9MB.
So have a look among your files and tell me if you've found it.

zippy75

yes it's in the .smplayer folder

bat999

Good, that's your radio programme.

There's two methods to play it.

Method 1. Very simple, just rename the file with an ra ending. Such as stream.ra or anything.ra then you can play it on your PC using Real Player or similar.

Method 2. Change it to a more useful format such as mp3 or m4a or wav. There are many converter programs, the one I use is WinFF.
From here:-http://www.biggmatt.com/

Those BBC programmes are encoded with Real Codec at 64Kbps.
If I convert them to mp3 I use 128Kbps. Sometimes just 96Kbps for speech.
I find that if I set it to less than 96Kbps it sounds crappy. If more than 128Kbps it takes too long to convert.
But it's up to you.

Tell me if the file plays OK.

zippy75

plays perfectly

bat999

OK
Each of those Listen Again programmes has it's own URL link.
You can get them from the BBC website, but it's awkward.
It's easiest to use the Beebotron website.

For example.
To download Sounds of the 70s.

Go to the Beebotron website.
It's here:-http://beebotron.timeforabrew.com/
Click on BBC Listen Again-links
Click on Radio 2 Listen Again
Look down the list till you see Sounds of the 70s
Then RIGHT CLICK on it and COPY
(Now you've got the correct URL on your clipboard)
Then go to SMPlayer and paste it in.

It's a half hour programme so the stream.dump is 14MB.

That's it. Any questions?

zippy75

I get an error message saying Download could not complete!

no no hang on I've got it the address was in the address bar if if I right clicked and clicked open in new window, so I entered that into SMplayer.

bat999

zippy75 wrote: »

I get an error message saying Download could not complete!

I've edited my post.
It's RIGHT CLICK and COPY.
Maybe that's the trouble.

zippy75

Yes! That all works when I followed it through as in your example.

bat999 you are an absolute star; thank you for all your help, I now have a new PC skill under my belt - learning all the time!

Thanks again !:beer:

Zippy

zippy75

bat999 wrote: »

I've edited my post.
It's RIGHT CLICK and COPY.
Maybe that's the trouble.

Ah yes that's even easier!!

Zippy

Thanks:j

bat999

OK
There are a couple of other things.

If you're just going to listen once and delete then ra format is ok.
If you're going to archive then mp3 is probably better. It's up to you.

The BBC shows are too long, talking before and after. To crop them I use mp3DirectCut (or Audacity for wav files).
From here:- http://mpesch3.de1.cc/

To 'normalize' an mp3 I use mp3gain.
From here:- http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/

Then lastly tag them with an mp3 tagger.

You can experiment, have fun.:cool:;)