Recording Radio on the MAC

Well the good news is that for the MAC there exists an application that will start any arbitary application (lets say Real Player) capture the audio stream and turn it into an MP3. The application is called Hijack pro

So here is a worked example of howto Record an audio program and turn it into an MP3 file for use on your player.

Install the MAC real player

First you need to install the free version of Real Player for the MAC. navigate the www.real.com site and make sure you persist and find the free player (unless you want to buy the higher function pay for it player of course)

At the time of writing I found the free player here

RealPlayer10GOLD.dmg downloaded so I followed their instructions:

If the browser instead downloads and leaves a file called RealPlayer10GOLD.dmg, follow these steps:

1 Double-click RealPlayer10GOLD.dmg; a new disk drive should appear called RealPlayer Disk Image.

2 Open RealPlayer Disk Image, and drag the RealPlayer icon to your Applications folder.

3 Unmount RealPlayer Disk Image. To do this, select it in the Finder and choose Eject from the File Menu

4 Drag the RealPlayer10GOLD.dmg file to the trash.

5 Double-click RealPlayer in your Applications folder.

Allow it to close your Safari browser

Now it starts itself up and plays a message or two

I would test it out. Try listening to this stream BBC radio7

Install Audio Hijack Plus

This step will involve a small amount of money as its not free software.

Download the Hijack Pro Software

Double click on the downloaded .DMG file

As the graphic suggests drag the icon to your applications folder

I loaded Hijack Pro and this is the about box

Working example for Dads Army

So lets assume we want to record Dads Army from BBC Radio 7

Here is the screen

Note:

Put in the URL for the real audio stream for Dads Army
Its going to record from 09:00 to 09:32 every Thursday
We have selected RealPlayer as an Application audio source i.e. When the time comes Hijack Pro will start RealPlayer and send it the URL for it to produce the sound to be recroded
Record tickbox (bottom right) means record the audio stream
Mute means record it silently
Quit source means after the audio stream finishes quit the application (i.e. in our case RealPlayer)

Of course lets assume you did not have your MAC switched on and you missed that episode. Well Radio 7 allows you to listen again to any program for upto 7 days so lets setup a Listen Again Dads Army setting. We will use this anytime we missed a program and want to catch up on it. Look at the settings:

So in this case the URL is the listen again URL
The schedule tickbox is not selected (though a schedule is confusingly there)
Record is selected so it will start Realplayer and start recording
Mute is not checked so the sound will be played on the speakers as recording commences
Quit Source is not selected so when the recording finishes real player will be left running
Notice in top right it has ran for 27 seconds and generated a 424Kb MP3 file
How did it know to record to MP3? See the Recording Tab

That's all really. Armed with this technique you can hit the road with some quality to audio to listen to.