WTUL is Tulane University’s radio station. I know a lot of people who have shows on WTUL, but they’re often at odd times like 3 am. Being something of a morning person by habit, if not by nature, I’m not always up or available at these odd hours to catch the shows I want to hear.

Furthermore, I’ve been spoiled by my MythTV set-up. It lets me watch shows whenever I want, rather than only when they come on. Now, there’s a neat program called streamripper that’s great for saving songs from internet radio. It splits the songs out, tags them using the metadata in the stream, and names them accordingly. There are two reasons that’s not satisfactory for my WTUL listening purposes.

The first is that WTUL doesn’t at present put song info in their stream metadata. The second is that I generally want to catch a person’s whole show as if I were listening to it on the radio. Luckily, MPlayer makes it easy to dump a stream to a file. As such, I wrote a wrapper script in bash to record for me.

If you’re a bash user (probably you run OS X, Linux, BSD, or some other UNIX), you might like to get the script from my personal site. There are directions there for use. Note that it requires MPlayer.

NB: I recently added a feature. I’ve included the ability to tag each recording in addition to the date and duration info automatically added to the filename. After a week of use I noticed that I couldn’t remember which show was whose. Therefore, it’s now possible to specify a third argument, which is added to the front of the filename instead of “stream.” If nothing is supplied it just defaults back to “stream.”

Give it a try. Let me know if you find it useful or if you think some additional feature(s) would be useful.