Amplesamples

I’ve found a way of automating recordings of radio stations. This has been included on a dissensus forum but I thought I should include it here too, as I’m pretty darn proud of myself for working this out by myself!

Using automator you can record Resonance streams while you’re away, using no extra software.

If you use Leopard this will be of interest to you. It might work on Tiger, but I haven’t tried it out.

First go to Resonance schedule and copy the ical feed at the bottom of the page

Open up iCal, go to the Calendar menu. Choose ‘Subscribe’ and paste the feed in.

Now you have Resonance Schedule in iCal. Find something that you would like to record.

Then download these files and unzip them. Keep them somewhere sensible.

Go back to ICal - make sure your home diary is ticked and displayed, and the resonance one is too.
You can look up a show and set up a new event to start, for example, 2 minutes before the start of the show. Edit the event - call it something you can remember such as Recording. Set the ‘from’ field to 2 minutes before the show starts. Set the ‘to’ field to at [B]least a minute later[/B]. This seems weird, but the recording is not really affected by the ‘to’ time, unless the times are identical - set it to a minute later than the ‘from’ time and you’ll be fine.

Go down to Alarm and choose ‘Open File’. Underneath it might say iCal. It’s a drop-down menu - choose ‘Other’.

Navigate to the folder you downloaded and choose Resonance Record. Then underneath, choose ‘on date’. Underneath it choose the date and time of the start of the event (which is the same as the ‘from’ field earlier).

After that you should be done. All you need to do now is to set up another alarm to stop the recording. Set up a new event - set it up the same way but this time make sure that the stop time is about two minutes after the end of your desired program (just to be safe). Make sure your alarm is ‘open file’, but this time navigate to the ‘Stop’ file that was included in the download. Ensure that the alarm time is the same as the ‘from’ time.

Now your computer is set up to record the program with no further input from you! Set up as man of these as you like in iCal!

You might have to rename the resonance_hi.mp3.download file in your finder to resonance_hi.mp3, but as long as it’s an mp3 file you’ll be fine.

Make sure iCal has the options ‘Turn off all alarms’ & Turn off alarms only when iCal is not open’ [B]both unchecked[/B].

If you set up the schedule inside your energy settings to turn on your computer at a certain time, and set up your accounts so that it automatically logs in to your account when turns on, then you could set it up to record stuff days, even weeks in advance if you need to.

I’d like to post a video tutorial of this - I’ll try to do so when I’ve got some server space (anyone know of decent providers) and a program to do so!