GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Using MPlayer

Debian Packages: mplayer sox

We can record a live audio stream from the Internet using mplayer. The following example records from TwinCities FM, Wannero, Western Australia (http://www.twincitiesfm.com.au/. You need to interrupt (e.g., Ctrl-C) mplayer at some stage, once enough has been recorded. The sox command then translates the resulting wav file into the more compressed ogg format.

  $ mplayer mms://202.137.109.9:1426/live \
    -nocache -ao pcm:file=xstream.wav -vo null -vc dummy
  $ sox xstream.wav xstream.ogg

You can listen to the audio as it is being captured with the play command from sox, running in a different terminal so you have some idea where to stop the stream:

  $  play xstream.wav

(Thanks to Tony McNamara

for feedback on this page.)