How to Record a Shoutcast Stream on a Schedule

by William Jackson on 2006-02-20

Have you heard? Iʼve been drumming up Labarum for the Latter Day for a while. But stuff keeps coming up and I miss it. I decided that I need to record the broadcasts automatically. This is how I did it.

This process can be generalized to record any shoutcast-compatible audio stream. Because of the nature of this operation, it is well-suited to be done on a server that is always running.

Hereʼs what you need:

1. Unix, on a computer with internet access that is turned on (of course) at the time you want to record the stream. Servers work great. These instructions assume you have command-line access to your server.
2. Perl. Most Unix computers have Perl installed already. Type which perl to find out if you have Perl installed on your server.
3. cron. If you have Unix and you donʼt have cron, something is wrong with you. cron is the program that runs other programs on a particular schedule. Other programs like …
4. icecream. No, really, icecream is the Perl script that does all the work. It wouldnʼt hurt to have some vanilla ice cream handy, too.

Hereʼs what you do:

1. Download icecream. Unzip the files and put them on your server somewhere. I put mine in /home/william/icecream/

2. Set up cron to run icecream when you need to. Type crontab -e to edit your cron jobs. On a new line in the crontab file, follow the crontab format to specify when you want the job to run. Hereʼs what I used:

   25 19 \* \* 3 perl /home/william/icecream/icecream -q --name=kvrx-\\%Y-\\%m-\\%d --stop=40min http://129.116.109.132/listen.pls

   25 19 \* \* 3 means the command will be executed at 7:25pm on the third day of every week.

   perl /home/william/icecream/icecream is the actual command to run icecream.

   -q tells icecream to not output anything (q is for quiet).

   --name=kvrx-\\%Y-\\%m-\\%d gives the name of the file icecream will create when it records the radio stream. %Y-%m-%d gives the current date, while the backslashes are there to keep cron from complaining. I learned that through trial and error.

   --stop=40min tells icecream to stop recording after 40 minutes have passed.

   http://129.116.109.132/listen.pls is the location of the stream. 3. Wait for the appointed time to come around, then look in your home directory for the file that icecream created. Thatʼs all!

I should never miss recording an episode of Labarum for the Latter Day again.

Oh, and sorry. I know most of you hate reading or donʼt read this sort of stuff, but I want to have it around in case I need to do it again at some time in the future.