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Jogging with an iPod is fun, but even a big music collection gets tiring if you listen to it every day. RadioRecorder lets you take a selection of your favourite internet radio stations along with you. Here is an action screenshot. Download your copy here and perhaps leave me a tip.


Finding stuff to record

iTunes comes with a small selection of radio stations in it's "Radio" playlist, but there is a lot more to Internet radio than that. RadioRecorder works especially well with stations you might find at http://www.shoutcast.com/ and http://www.icecast.org/ (choose only mp3 streams from that site for now). You can also visit http://www.vtuner.com/ for a good selection of stations, including many foreign ones. Just make sure the station can be played in iTunes before trying it with RadioRecorder.

Setting up a recording

  1. RadioRecorder supports any number of scheduled recordings that can be active simultaneously. Pick up an existing recording from the list at the top. New, Clone, Delete, Save and Revert buttons work as expected. The first time you run the program, or if you delete all your recordings, a new one will be automatically created.

  2. You need to fill in a URL of the radio station. The easiest way to do this is to drag a radio station track from iTunes to the RadioRecorder window. This will also pre-set name and playlist of the recording from iTunes information about the station. Otherwise, type the http:// URL manually or drag it from a web browser. If your URL points to an m3u or pls file, RadioRecorder will use the first entry, which may be not what you want (for example, a low bit rate version). Entering a direct URL is recommended.

  3. RadioRecorder will normally add its recordings to iTunes music library and the playlist you specify. Type a playlist name in the approporiate field (it will be created if necessary). If you leave this field blank, the files will be just left in Music/Radio Recorder folder of your home directory and not added to iTunes library.

  4. Mp3 files use lots of disk/iPod space. You can set a limit on how large the playlist will grow before RadioRecorder starts deleting tracks from it's beginning. To save a particular track, just move it to another playlist. This option has no effect if you leave the playlist field blank.

    Be careful with this option if you are splitting recordings into songs, as it will count number of songs rather than recordings in this case.

Splitting the recording into songs
  1. RadioRecorder supports Shoutcast and Icecast radio stations that send titles of the songs they play to the user. You can choose to save each song in a separate file rather than one large file for the whole recording. This allows you play your favourite songs in any order you want. If the station doesn't send track titles, this checkbox has no effect. Make an experiment to find out.

  2. <>Song titles are often in the format "Artist - Song" or "Artist - Album - Song". By default, RadioRecorder will assume this is the case and set Artist, Album and name of the songs accordingly. Uncheck this checkbox if you get confusing results.

  3. When splitting recordings, RadioRecorder normally only saves complete songs - it must see both the beginning and the end during the recording. Some stations occasionally play very long "songs" that are actually whole CDs, custom programming and so on. Check "Keep partial songs" checkbox to keep those items. They will have names like "Start of <song>" and "End of <song>" when the recording completes.

  4. If your radio station sends non-english song titles, you might see garbage in file names. In this case, select the language you think songs are in from a drop down list. Some languages have more than one encoding, so experiments may be necessary.

Track tags



If you wish, you can customize title, artist, album and genre of recorded songs. This mostly applies when not splitting recordings into tracks, as in the later case the values will be generated automatically. As an exception, your selection of genre will be always used unless you leave the field blank. I would recommend that you either leave it to be "Radio Recorder" or come up with categories like "Rock - Radio Recorder".  In this way, you can easily locate and easily delete recordings from your music library.

Scheduling the recording

Select starting time and duration of the recording from the approporiate drop down lists. You can either check the “daily” box or pick individual week days. If you specify “Once”, each weekday will be cleared after recording is done at that time. Once you are satisfied, click “Save” to apply the new schedule. You can also immediatelly start a recording with the specified length by clicking “Now”. Active recordings will display their progress and have a start (*) next to the name in the drop down list. You can click “Stop” button anytime to cancel the active recording. The file will be still saved and added to the playlist

<>You can choose to reconnect if the network connection to the station fails. This works well if you are splitting recordings into songs and not keeping partial songs. If you are recording music into one large file, you might want to leave this checkbox off.
Otherwise, you might end up with lots of small pieces which are not so enjoyable to listen to.

Your computer needs to be on and RadioRecorder running for the recording to take place. Both are the easiest to arrange through System Preferences. Go to “Accounts”, pick your user name and then “Startup items”. Drag the radio recorder into the list and click the “Hide” checkbox to prevent the recordings window from showing up unless you click on the tray icon. Radio recorder now will be automatically run when you login.

Now go to Energy/Schedule in System Preferences. Schedule the computer to wake up 10 minutes before your recording starts. You can either shut it down after recording ends or just set it to sleep after specified idle time.

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RadioRecorder is completely free and comes with the complete source code. But if you use it a lot, you are welcome to leave me a tip and encourage me to write more free software. Just click the obvious box on the left to get started. Thanks!

And yes, it's completely optional and up to you :-)



Enhancing RadioRecorder

Each download comes with the complete source code, as an Xcode project, meaning you need Panther to play with it. RadioRecorder is a free software under General Public License version 2 (and only that version). As you likely now, this means you need to release your changes under GPL as well.

RadioRecorder uses AppleScript code by Buzz Andersen under Creative Commons Attribution License. See NSAppleScript* files in the source for details.

I wrote most of my previous Mac projects in Java, so this time I really wanted to “get into” Objective C and AppKit/Foundation frameworks. I have no doubt a lot of code like string manipulation would be shorter using plain old C functions, so don't laugh at me and think I don't know.

Change Log

05/11 Version 1.01 Added support for pls and m3u files
05/12 Version 1.02 Added support for NLS station names and reconnecting on failure
05/17 Version 1.03

05/18 Version 1.04
05/19 Version 1.05
05/21 Version 1.06
10/02 Version 1.07
01/08/05 Version 1.08

Contact me

I write programs mostly for fun and my own use, so I don't think I will spend a lot of time maintaining RadioRecorder. With that in mind, you can contact me at yahoo.com as user cat_plus_plus and start the subject with RadioRecorder so that I can see it's not spam. Cheers!