Streamripper for Winamp
Streamripper is an Open Source (GPL) application that allows you to record streaming mp3 to your hard drive. It comes as a stand-alone application too, but it’s better known for its Winamp plug-in version.
There are quite many applications intended to allow the user to capture mp3 streams / internet radio stations and save them as separated songs, but few of them are free and even fewer are truly reliable and do a good job. Well, there’s a saying - “best things in life are free”, and Streamripper for Winamp manages to proove this saying is quite true.
Probably the nicest feature of this tool is not that it records quite flawlessly the shoutcast-compatible streams, but it is able to find the “meta data”, the track separation data, and uses this data as a marker for where the track should be separated. And it does a really good job separating the tracks as they should be. Furthermore, it will automatically name/tag the ripped tracks based on the original track tag received from the stream. This file naming feature is also user configurable.
Ripping the streams is easy - just choose a stream from the Winamp Media Library’s Internet Radio station or select one from www.shoutcast.com and wait to see the “press start to rip…” message on Streamripper’s interface. Then press “Start” and watch as what you’re listening to is instantly recorded to an audio file on your hard drive.
Checking the “Options” window first might be a good idea. In the “Connections” tab of this window you may enable the “Create relay stream” setting. This is particularly useful if you don’t have a fat pipe connection (cable modem/dsl, T1, etc.). Otherwise Streamripper creates a new connection to the stream you’re listening to, increasing your bandwidth usage. This won’t be a noticeable matter if you have a good connection, but otherwise it may count quite a lot. This option will make Streamripper rip the stream and send it on to Winamp. You might also want to use this option if you’re listening to streams that won’t accept a high number of listeners or if you don’t want to waste their server capacity. Once this option enabled Winamp will actually be playing through the Streamripper.
Here in the “Connections” tab of the “Options” window you will also be able to set a size limit for the ripped streams.
In the “File” tab you will find some more important options, such as selecting the output directory for the ripped streams or choosing between ripping to a single file or to separated files. Overwriting and ID3 tag adding options are also available here. You may also even configure Streamripper to automatically add the ripped tracks to the current Winamp playlist.
Browse the other tabs of the “Options” window to check other settings such as the output filename pattern, the Streamripper skins, the silence length for track splitting, etc.
I’ve also noticed that there’s no need to keep listening to the stream this tool is ripping from. I checked what other radio stations were playing or start playing a track from my computer, and Streamripper kept on ripping the stream it was set to rip. I was testing Streamripper 1.63.1 on Winamp 5 with no relay stream created when noticing this.
As some streams also broadcast announcements, commercials, advertisments or other non-music metadata, you should know that by ripping using this tool you may handle this type of issues in two ways - either you’re recording the songs to separated files and then you may easily remove the unwanted metadata from the ripped files afterwards, or edit the file parse_rules.txt that came with the Streamripper distribution and add rules that describe the metadata you want to be ignored. For this second method you may check the producer’s website for an example and further details.
Well, Streamripper is not a sound recorder, so don’t expect it to rip online conversations or the music played directly in some websites (Flash-based or other similar) but as a stream ripper for mp3 radio stations, this Winamp plug-in is simply great.
Good parts: works really great, it’s light, simple and efficient. Its track separating and track auto naming / tagging features are truly great.
Not-so-good parts: lacking comprehensive, rich documentation and help, which may make this great tool a bit hard to understand and use for the not-so-experienced users in the beginning. Anyway, it’s just a Winamp plugin after all, so, in the end, everyone should be able to use it properly.
NOTE:
You can use Streamripper to copy the streams of the following kinds:
-.mp3 Shoutcast streams - the kind of streams found on shoutcast.com.
-.mp3 Icecast streams - a GNU GPL/Open Source version of Shoutcast. Both Icecast 1.x and Icecast 2.x are supported. However, UDP metadata is not supported for Icecast 1.x.
-.nsv (Nullsoft Streaming Video) streams - which Winamp tv uses.
-.aac Shoutcast/Icecast streams - the kind of streams found on tuner2.com. NOTE: Streamripper can’t rip RealAudio AAC streams, only shoutcast/icecast AAC.
-.ogg streams - these streams are found at dir.xiph.org.
Streamripper can’t help with ripping stuff like RealPlayer, Windows MediaPlayer, MusicMatch or anything else similar.
