[chrisintx]

I wonder if anyone figure out a way to record those digital music channels to the htpc. The other question is, if there is a way to do it, how can I record automated one song at the time so do I have to record the entire stream and then brake into individual songs?

 

[EricN]

I've puzzled over a way to automate this myself. My ideas were something along the lines of a screen capture with some OCR to get the song information combined with cutting the sound stream during pauses. If using pauses is unreliable, you could possibly detect the song changes by monitoring when the song/album display changes. This happens about 30 seconds into each song, but I haven't tested whether this is consistent.


I've surfed a bit for appropriate tools for this, but haven't looked much further than that. As a side note, does building a music connection through automated recording of these channels fall under fair use? What about distribution of an application to automate this? One could build a sizeable mp3 collection just by running such a program. The potential is certainly comparable to Napster in the "pissing off RIAA" department, and possibly has a legal leg to stand on.

 

[chrisintx]

I think the major difference would be that Im paying for my digital cable music channels and I just want to build some songs for my own collections as in Napster and Kazaa people are getting it for free I guess. I have thought about your suggestion but, is there a way of just getting the audio and not audio and video?Wonder if there is other people out there with the same question

 

[EricN]

The reason I would also want the video is so I don't end up with thousands of unlabeled mp3s. Somehow reading the song/album information off the screen and using that to catalogue the mp3 would be pretty useful.

 

[urfthewog]

You might want to try Total Recorder - http://www.highcriteria.com/ Was thinking of the same thing but have not tried it.