One of my previous smartphones, a Samsung A13 (which is now a brick) had an FM radio app which had a record facility.
They discontinued the FM radio app on newer Samsungs
so in the absence of built in FM radio app are there any free radio apps where you can record the radio (doesn’t have to be FM, can be internet radio too)
I know I can record whatever’s streaming with Audio Hijack but are there any free options to record anything that’s streaming (Android/Windows/iOS)
Check out the brill Audacity.
On Windows, you’ll probably need to enable “Stereo Mix” as a source then use Audacity, Goldwave or similar to record. It can be a bit tricky because Windows tends to try and hide it (presumably to stop exactly what it allows you to do).
That should allow you to record anything that’s coming through your computer sound.
Audacity is a brilliant free tool but can be a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a walnut/learning exercise at first.
The key is to ‘Export’ the audio to a (WAV/mp3/etc) file to play on any device. Whereas ‘Save’, er, saves the whole project in Audacity format for later opening/playback in, er, Audacity.
Some things are much more difficult these days than in the past. Get an old boombox to record the radio and a Walkman to listen on the move, few blank cassettes, press a couple of buttons. Done!
Huzzah!
From a similar place: my old obsolete tuner has a spare set of RCA lines out, connect to my old obsolete Nakamichi – and Bob (as Mr F obliquely implies below) is yer uncle!
Now back to the OP…
I still have a FM tuner and a Nakamichi cassette deck connected to the hi-fi, and I recently found my Sony Walkman DC2 (playback-only version of the DC6) in a box in the loft.
Mind you, the rest of my system consists of Linn and Naim, so I live in 1972.
1973, Shirley?
Well, the LP12 appeared in July 1972 but the NAP250 power amp didn’t until 1975! Naim started in 1973 with the NAP160. You learn something every day…
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I seemed to recall that Linn started before Naim – or certainly that the LP12 arrived before any Naim product…
For BBC stuff use Get_iplayer. A tad fiddly but definitely worth it.
You can download (some) shows on BBC Sounds app
This and the one it’s replying to are your best bet, if you are on a Windows PC and what you want to record is a BBC show.
Get_iplayer is a marvellous piece of software, which I personally use from the Windows Terminal*.
The simplest command is get_iplayer –type=radio –get “[name of show you want to record goes in here without brackets]” which will download every available episode of that show. Usually a month’s worth. Note that there are two dashes before “type” and “get”. For some reason it looks to me like they render as one quote here above.
Note also that if the name of the show contains spaces, you mustn’t forget the quotes before and after or you may not get what you expect, or anything at all.
*In case you don’t know, Windows Terminal is the Windows Command Line interpreter, harking back to the old pre-Windows days of computing, whereon you can execute commands that don’t need (or haven’t got) the fancy Windows desktop. See below for where to find it.
When you download and install Get_iplayer it will place a folder on your desktop entitled “iPlayer Recordings” which is where anything you then download through the program will be placed, in .m4a format. It also places desktop links to the basic get_iplayer program in the Windows Terminal, plus a rather primitive interface for scheduling your downloads and a basic Personal Video Recorder, none of which I’ve ever felt any real need for. The default for all these desktop apps is BBC TV programmes, which I’m not interested in downloading. Hence why I prefer using it via Terminal, which you’ll find about half way down the list of things when you right-click on the Windows logo at the extreme left of your taskbar.
Anothe way to run it is press Windows key+r together and type cmd into the dialog box that appears.
(BTW it’s not actually windows terminal, that’s a different utility from the command line interpreter you correctly mention above)
There are ‘Terminal’ settings associated with the get_iplayer application command line:
Well sure. I was making the distinction that the cmd utility is different from the the ‘Terminal’ utility (which provides a fancy front end to Windows whatever terminal based utility you are running but isn’t itself a shell interpreter).
Mike’s right – you can safely ignore most of the guff that will appear in your Start menu when you install get_iplayer.
The only bit you need to use is the icon called ‘get_iplayer’ which looks like this:
Click that and the command line window opens on your desktop.
Go to the BBC page where the radio prog lives, and copy the url in your browsers address field. Here’s an example:
Once you have the programme url copied, go to the get_iplayer command line and type in this:
get_iplayer – – url=”programme url”
Note the need to put TWO hyphens in front of the ‘url=’ bit, with no space in between them, and no space between the second hyphen and the ‘url=’. (It just doesn’t render properly in here, I’ve spaced em out to make it clear – hopefully!)
The programme url needs to be enclosed in double quotes, as I’ve shown above.
Hit ‘Enter’ and get_iplayer will download the programme and convert it into an audio file automatically, for you to listen to whenever you want.
If you type get_iplayer – -type=radio (with, as mentioned above no space between the two dashes or the remainder of the line, a full listing of all BBC Radio programmes that are available will be downloaded and stored in the app’s database. Then you can just request shows by their name or a significant part of their name.
e.g for Desert Island Discs you’d type
get_iplayer – -type=radio “desert Island discs”
or even type
get_iplayer –type=radio “desert”.
to get a list of the available DID shows.
Additionally, looking at the URL of a show that you want, for instance the one in Foxy’s screenshot above, if you take note of the last part of it, which is the Beeb’s 8-character Program IDentifier, you could download it by typing
get_iplayer – -pid=b0151nxr
You don’t actually need to use the full URL using that method and you can even download a selection of programmes in one go by adding other PIDs, separated by commas, after the first one.
Everything above is listed at https://www.squarepenguin.co.uk/guides/
I wimped out and used the Apple version which is much easier. Not that I’d ever usually advocate Apple for anything other than as a refreshing snack after lunch.
I had an app called Tune In Radio which was good and I’m fairly sure allowed recording.
Great thanks for the replies.
I’m using get iplayer on my macbook, works great for bbc radio,
because i’m in ireland it won’t let me do TV but that’s fine, life’s too short
re recording any other radio:
I didn’t realise Audacity would let me record what’s streaming
Sorry can I run through the steps, am I to start my streaming and then go into record – at what point am I exporting to wav etc? thanks
Out of curiosity, I’ve just given it a go. I’m on a Windows 10 laptop, though.
First thing I did was check Audacity for updates, I then installed version 3.6.4
Audio Setup – Audio Settings
Interface. Host: Windows WASAPI
Playback. Device: Speakers.
Recording. Device: Speakers (loopback). Channels: 2 (Stereo).
Quality. Default Sample Rate: 44100 Hiz. Default Sample Format: 16-bit.
I then pressed play on a radio stream, pressed Record in Audacity.
Press stop in Audacity and the recording ends.
Then File – Export Audio – Export to Computer.
Export Audio menu gives options for File Name, Folder, Format, etc.
And Robert was my mother’s brother.
Any audio going through or created on your computer can be recorded with Audacity.
To enable computer audio recording you need to ensure that when you click on Audio Setup (top right of app), under Recording Device, [whatever your computer’s sound device is called] (loopback) is the option selected.
The sequence of actions to record is click Record at the top of the screen first, which puts the app into recording standby until audio is detected. Then when you start streaming what you want to record it will begin recording and continue until either you click Stop or Pause.
In record mode, if there is no sound detected after the stream has finished playing or you stop it yourself, it will automatically pause the recording until either there is further sound detected or you click Stop.
To save your recording go to the File menu and click on Export – Export Audio and the recording will be saved in .wav format unless you have set it up to record in another format.
lovely thanks, I’ll give all that a go, appreciate it