How to record and convert real audio streams to mp3

I came up with this one a long time ago - its a nice little hack. It requires mplayer (and the right codecs) and lame. It might work on windows if you have cygwin installed. It should work with any type of stream that mplayer can play, not just real audio streams.

This approach uses a fifo virtual file to make sure that you don’t waste disk space storing raw audio data. It just pushes the audio data into the fifo, and lame pulls it out all asynchronously.


mkfifo soundpipe
lame -b 64 soundpipe filename.mp3 & mplayer -quiet -ao pcm -aofile soundpipe URL_OF_STREAM