Listening Again to BBC Radio on GNU/Linux
I was recently going to attend the recording of a BBC debate over copyright in the age of digital networks (the “copyfight,” as its popularly known), but missed it due to circumstances on the day. I’ve just got round to downloading the recording, and I haven’t listened to BBC Radio oinine since I switched to using purely free software.
The amazing mplayer’s manual was my starting point, and from the debate page I clicked the “[AUDIO] Latest Programme” link at the top right. I then right clicked the “Listen using stand-alone Real Player” link and selected “Save Link As” and saved this file to my home directory. This .ram file is just a Real Audio playlist, detailing where the stream is. Real Audio streams can be played with MPlayer, so I opened a Terminal and did:
mplayer -ao pcm -ao pcm:file=out.wav -playlist lawinaction.ram
This results in a large .wav file, that I encode into a nice and small Ogg Vorbis file and rename appropriately:
oggenc out.wav ; mv out.ogg "BBC Radio 4 - Law in Action - Copyfight.ogg"
I then used the nice and simple TagTool to add tags.
The Listening Again to BBC Radio on GNU/Linux by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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Speex is probably more appropriate than Ogg Vorbis for archiving spoken word content.