RipShout: rip Shoutcast internet radio stations to your hard drive with RipShout
Description: RipShout saves the audio from “shoutcast” internet radio stations directly to your hard drive. It will preserve the song’s IDv3 tag info and organize recorded audio by creating a folder for each artist and saving the individual tracks within it.
This has to be the world’s most straightforward internet radio recorder/”ripper”. All you need to do is get the URL of the internet radio station that you want to record; however, the station has to use the “Shoutcast” protocol, which is the most common on the internet, and RipShout will record the audio stream for you. Here are more notes on this program:
- How it works: once you find a station you like you can (1) click on the station’s link and open it with RipShout, (2) right click on the shoutcast link and select copy shortcut, then paste it into the box at the bottom of the app, or (3) right click on the Shoutcast link and select “save as” to save the .PLS file to your desktop, which you could then open from within RipShout.
- Don’t have a station in mind? :go to shoutcast.com for an entire directory of these, and a search box to help you find things stations you like.
- Supported stations: RipShout only records MP3 based Shoutcast radio stations, so make sure that you do not choose AAC format stations. Note: some internet radio streams typically give you a choice between 128kbit and lower quality streams; for recording purposes always go with the higher quality.
- Recording: you could either do this silently in the background or you could choose to hear what is being recorded either through RipShout’s own internal player or through WinAmp. This did not work for me, unfortunately (my internal player did not produce any sound, and I do not use WinAmp).
- Organization: in theory RipShout will create a folder for each artist and save the individual tracks within it, and IDv3 tag info will be preserved. In reality the tagging is unpredictable, and the tracks in many cases are not distinct and will simply be strung together in a single MP3 file. You can use Audacity to edit big files and isolate individual songs, though.
- Memory usage: is a very small 1 meg when launched, and 3 megs when recording, which might be good to know if you are using this to record something in the background while you do other things on your PC.
Wish list: although adding functions to this program will make it larger when it is currently nice and small, I will venture a couple of points below:
- A browser context menu entry whereby you could just right click on a Shoutcast radio station and choose “Rip with RipShout”… would be very cool.
- A window within the application that shows the history of what has been ripped to disk (including bitrate) and the option to delete files from that same interface.
- Fixing the “internal player” preview option, which did not work for me.
- Not overwriting files on disk. I noticed this when I was recording a news station, where possibly there was no IDv3 tag info, and a latter recording overwrote the earlier one.
The verdict: according to the author, he wrote RipShout because “all the other programs that claimed to offer this functionality either didn’t work or charged you a lot of money and also didn’t work.” I have a special affinity to small programs that do a single thing well, which is what I like about this one: it is minimalist but very easy to use (oh, and it works). I imagine a number of users will not like that it requires .NET framework v3.0 though (comes pre-installed with Vista).
On recording internet radio: I will admit to finding the concept of recoding internet radio stations a little strange, in that you listen to a station then go back and delete all the tracks recorded that you do not want, and keep those that you liked. It seems that there are much easier ways on the internet to (ahem) hone in on exactly what you want; unless you’re simply browsing for new stuff, of course, inwhich case this application would be your perfect companion.
Version Tested: 1.0
Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. requires Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.0.
Go to the RipShout page to download the latest version (approx 1.07 megs).
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So this seems much simpler than Screamer Radio (your review: http://www.freewaregenius.com/2007/01/20/screamer-radio/ )
However, too much simplicity might not be a good thing. Screamer solves several of the problems you listed:
1 It doesn’t require .NET
2 It doesn’t require the Shoutcast protocol
3 It handles mp3, ogg, and wma streams
4 You can save only the songs you choose as you listen
5 Since it’s mainly a player, you shouldn’t have any problems hearing it
Plus, it includes a database of stations, allows you to build a list of favorites, it doesn’t require installation, and is a good internet radio player with a small footprint - especially compared to bloatware like Winamp and WMP.
There wasn’t much about recording in your earlier review. Screamer allows you to set a buffer size (in KB) of the stream, which remains in RAM as you listen. If you set it high enough for your chosen encoding bitrate, it will be able to save the portion of the file in the buffer as well as the rest of the track. For example, at 128 kbps, if you have the buffer set to 4800 KB, pressing record as late as 5 minutes into the song will still result in the entire track being saved.
You can tell it to stop after the current track or continue to record the stream. It can sort recordings into .\station\artist subfolders and has a couple of other options for folder and track naming.
Like all technology, there is a trade-off between flexibility and ease-of-use. RipShout certainly looks dead-simple.
The installer reports that it needs .NET 3.5 - not 3.0.
Give me a reason why this is better than StreamRipper. I’ve used it for years. It tags and bags it in folders.
It also keeps a 10-30sek buffer in case the line is jumpy.
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/about.php
This is an old post but the sound is still a blizz: http://bloggotype.blogspot.com/2005/08/perfect-sound.html
In case you are interested to record multiple streams, check out Station ripper which can Records some 600 streams at one time. I’m not sure if it still gets the album cover as well (it used to). And yes, it smaller and takes less CPU, free, portable and…and yes you can read about the rest on their homepage.
Without having tried RipShout, I imediatly wanted to post my impression that Screamer Radio would be a much better choice for this purpose, but Joe beat me to it with a rather thoughtful account of the reasons supporting such opinion. Do check Screamer Radio out. Thanks to both Samer & Joe.
I got inspired to listen to Screamer Radio it is a personal favorite but I noticed it auto-updates with what seems to be a broken version. The menu is missing some top level items such as Preset and Recording. Anybody else experience this.
I’ve seen that problem, but only a few times. I thought it was related to my use of an alternative shell on my laptop.
I don’t think it’s related to auto-updating, especially since it hasn’t been developed for quite some time now (sadly). It’s got to be a bug in the GUI coding. I haven’t been using it so much lately because I started using SqueezeCenter and SoftSqueeze to stream and control my desktop’s music library to my laptop while I’m at work.
I agree with you guys that Screamer Radio is a better option. Streamripper looks good too (I think the last time I encountered this one it did not have a frontend and I decided to pass it voer).
Despite having reviewed Screamer Radio, I forgot that it provided the option to save streams locally (its been more than a year since that review).
On the other hand, it is possible that some users might appreciate RipShout’s bare-bones simplicity.
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Using Streamripper. Maybe I’ll use this one to rip an additional stream at the same time. Thanks!
@ Ola
Thanks for that link where I also found the DSP effect stacker for Winamp! Just what I needed.
I’m using Radiotracker for ripping radio stations and also for downloading musics from there. I think that it is a good tool cause it can rip many radios. Besides that it has some features which are very useful.
Great, it’s a wonderfull application
Sorry my english, becasuse Im hungarian boy 
Author here. Thanks for the feedback, I’ll keep it in mind for the next version but as the OP guessed, I’m trying to keep Ripshout pretty simple.
I apologize for not liking streamripper or screameradio. Its ok if you do, everyone has different requrements.
I just wanted something small and intuitive that rips one stream cleanly with a small footprint. I’m a little suprised someone complained about the .Net requirement, I thought everyone had it installed anyway.
Thanks for the writeup. =o)
I think it’s great to save hits from radio stations, I really didn’t know we can do that until I found a good soft, Radiotracker, and now I have ‘tons’ of music only from internet radio stations.