With a lot of modern machines today you no longer have the ability to capture live streaming broadcasts (the noise coming out of your speakers) owing to certain copyright law of the land. Therefore you may rely on a YouTube downloading app/extension but unfortunately the resulting MP3's are usually little more than a novelty and mostly recycle bin fodder, as you pale and sicken at the quality of these most unremarkable sounding downloads.
But we do have an alternative way to record and edit Streaming Radio Broadcasts (along with other things that go Bumpitty Bump in the night).
Audacity right?
Wrong! This is it..............................
Ocenaudio http://www.ocenaudio.com/en/whatis
(above link) is the alternative that I have singled out here and it is bang on! I will explain the dilemma that drove me to make this post......
Here in Linux-Land I found myself haplessly adrift on a leaky boat, constantly bailing myself out of crappy MP3 recordings done via Audacity with the aid of PulseAudio Control. (Pulse here will give you the indication that Audacity is actually functioning as the sound capture instrument). On most occasions we have to fart around/configure the settings and volume inputs or even the Alsa/Pulse/HDMI etc, etc, just to get it to work, but then it crashes periodically, Grr!
All I wanted was something SIMPLE and bugger me if I could get some of the alternative software or Gnome packages to work with Mint Cinnamon Rosa. So I traipsed the forums for a few days and found this little GEM of a programme that not only records, but it can edit pretty well too!
Don’t get me wrong, Audacity does work, but it seems as if there is a little too much fussing around with it to get it to work properly for a simple task in Linux. And (ahem) Audacity does look a tad dated and has a steep learning curve.
For another thing; recording live/ streaming is really tiresome, resetting the input controls to get the best recording/output each time through PulseAudio and has sent me up the wall on a great many occasions. But now, recording stuff with this new find is no longer a hassle, you just hit the record button to start, then hit stop when you are done. Then you can save your fie to whatever file-type you need (and there are a few here) to wherever you want.
For me this is a huge bonus, I no longer have to wait up all night for free broadband before I try to capture stuff at the correct volume, blah, blah, blah. Now I can just schedule/chron-tab the jobs then save-as via the same method and just hope that Big Brother does not drop the connection, whilst recording hours and HOURS of rare radio broadcasts from the Beeb instead of using the poo-poo iPlayer software that only works on Micro$ux. Obviously that's my choice but whatever you are listening to is yours to keep at a quality you prefer.
Features: http://www.ocenaudio.com/features
Tested and working fine in Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa Cinnamon, but I am sure will work just as well on Ubuntu 14.04 upwards.
Not only that................................its cross platform too. Hey hey
See here: http://www.ocenaudio.com/download
(Note; My experimenting found that record streaming from Linux: You must have the "PulseAudio Volume Control" installed (from repository’s) and set it to record from Monitor of Buit-in Audio Analog Stereo), I'm sure it wont take long to master.
Verdict: I am chuffed to bits with this software and I hope you find it useful too.
But, having said that; Audacity is still a top notch editor, so both programmes are essential in my eyes and one does compliment the other.
