How to use your computer as a Tivo for internet radio

There are a lot of streaming radio stations on the internet with great shows. My problem is they don't always play when I want to listen to them. NPR affiliate, KASU, airs the Midnight Special at midnight early Saturday morning when I'm asleep. I'd still like to listen to the show. Here's how to time shift the show, storing it on a hard drive, just like Tivo does with television.

This is really easy to do using cvlc, the command line version of VLC, and your task scheduler. If you don't already have VLC here's the link.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

VLC is highly recommended. You can download and install from the link above or if your system has a software manager VLC is almost certainly included. Here's the description from their website about what the VLC Media Player does.

"VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols."

The command line version of VLC, cvlc, installs with VLC. So if you've got VLC installed and working you also have cvlc. Open a terminal or command line window and type this.

cvlc --help

If you get the help text you've got cvlc installed and you're ready to go.

My show, Something Blue, airs on KASU at 10:00 pm Saturday nights. If I am playing your music this Saturday night and you have a gig you can use cvlc and your task scheduler to record the show so you can listen to it Sunday morning.

Here's the cvlc command to record a one hour show from KASU's live stream. You may want to copy this into a text document using notepad or some other text editor to customize it for your show.

cvlc --run-time 3600 "http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kasu/ppr/kasu.m3u" --sout file/ogg:/home/larry/Music/Something_Blue/something_blue.ogg

--run-time controls the length of the recording in seconds. 3600 equals one hour.

Then in quotes I have the address of the stream. At kasu.org I right clicked on the Listen Now button and chose Copy Link Location. Then I pasted the link into the command line. To test this you can open VLC, click on Media and then Open Network Stream, and paste the link into the text box. Click play and you should hear the stream. If it works with VLC it will work with cvlc.

--sout file/ogg: controls the output format, location, and filename. So after the : you type the path to where you want to store the file and the filename. The path should already exist but the filename should be new.

If you are going to record the same show on a schedule you can use a time stamp to make sure each file name is new and different. This is a little snip of code that goes into the filename. Here is an exampe with the timestamp.

cvlc --run-time 3600 "http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kasu/ppr/kasu.m3u" --sout file/ogg:/home/larry/Music/Something_Blue/something_blue"$(date +\%F-\%T)".ogg

You may have to format the timestamp different for mac or windows.

To schedule this command to record the show when the show starts whether you are home or not open your task scheduler, copy or type your modified cvlc command in the command box, enter a meangingful description, and enter the start time of the show. If it's a daily or weekly show you want to record every time it airs set it up as a recurrent task.

Be sure to leave your computer on so it can record the show when it airs. And let your scheduler and cvlc work the magic.