All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
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dws (341)
Bit-scraping Car Talk
One of the high points of the weekend used to be listening to Car Talk while driving. My travel pattern has changed since moving, and I almost always miss the show now. I had rigged up an FM-radio to audio-in connection to let me capture
Car Talk keeps the most recent show available as a RealAudio feed. Bits. Hm...
Hypothetically, then, and with the help of a co-worker who knows the sekret of getting mplayer installed on Linux (configure yum to point to freshrpms.net, import their PGP key, use yum to install mplayer, and then figure out how to download and install the essential codecs), one could threw together a script that scrapes the Car Talk site for links to the ReadAudio files, streams them disk, converts them from
It would be a slow process (the RealAudio feed seems to be throttled), but that's what a 2 AM cron job is for. The basic incantation for ripping a segment of the show would probably look something like
$rtsp =
... link to real audio stream ...
mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile tmp.rm \
-dumpstream $rtsp
mplayer -ao pcm -aofile tmp.wav -vo \
-null -vc dummy --playlist tmp.rm
lame -h -b 128 tmp.wav segment$n.mp3
I'd be surpised if this same recipe didn't apply to lots of interesting feeds.
Or is it a BUG?"
"Let's call it an accidental feature. :-)"
--Larry Wall in <6909@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Car Talk in Real...? (Score:2)
Last time I checked Car Talk had stopped Real downloads, I'm glad they are back.
When I wanted to record Hitch Hikers from the Beeb [bbc.co.uk], I used Realplayer and the vsound [xenoclast.org] tool to get wav output that I then converted to Ogg Vorbis. I use Debian, so you just apt-get the right bits and it all works, YMMV.
-- "It's not magic, it's work..."
State of the art in Linux audio (Score:2)
Do I understand correctly that mplayer can a) play RealAudio files and b) convert those files to .wav format? I haven't looked in a long time, but the last time I checked RA was a proprietary format I couldn't possibly hope to use with free software. I knew they had opened a lot of their code, but I thought the codec was still proprietary.
J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
Re:State of the art in Linux audio (Score:2)
Scraping. (Score:2)
But alas, in the meantime, there is always the scraping.