First of all, as you could image, ripping song after song from an internet radio station can take quite a bit of disk space, so I suggest you create a directory specifically for ripping music on a partition that has plenty of free space. You can turn on the ripper and let it go for a while, then come back and sort through the music it has ripped and organize it/transfer it to the location of your real music library.

We are going to use StreamRipper to rip the music from the radio station. StreamRipper should be available as a package with most distributions of Linux, if it doesn't come with yours, see the StreamRipper link above.

You provide StreamRipper with a URL and it will chop each song from the stream and save it according to the Artist and Title information provided within the stream. It does the best job it can with the transition from one song to another, but sometimes it is a little off. You will sometimes get the end of one song or advertisement tacked on to the beginning of a song, but you can clean that up with a sound editor if it really bothers you. It's a small price to pay for free digital music.

We run StreamRipper with the following command.

streamripper http://64.236.34.4:80/stream/1018 -r -d /share/music/ripped

With the "-r" we are telling streamripper to relay this stream to a local address so the we can also listen to the stream while we are ripping it. This is not necessary, but I usually like to listen while I'm ripping. You can specify a specific port if you'd like, but the default port is 8000, so if you'd like to listen to the relay, point your music player to "localhost:8000" and it should pick right up. With the "-d" parameter we are telling StreamRipper to rip the music into the specified directory (remember the one we set aside earlier on a partition with plenty of space). We should end up with a directory named according to the stream info inside of the /share/music/ripped directory (eg. /share/music/ripped/MyInternetStream). Inside this directory will be a lot of music files and a directory called incomplete. The incomplete directory contains music files that have been chopped off for some reason (coming in/ or leaving in the middle of a song, etc.)