An enormous demonstration against the agents of global capital is in preparation for the Sept. meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Washington D.C. As it has for the last two years since Seattle, the Indymedia network will be springing into action to provide unfiltered coverage that isn’t already sold before it’s aired. The microradio network is working with the DC IMC to provide streaming audio coverage for on-line listening that will also be re-broadcast on community, LPFM and microradio stations around the world.
If the great microradio.net coverage from the FTAA in Quebec City is any example, there will be important news and discussions aired all day long and on into the night. Unless you choose not to sleep while the WB/IMF is going on, you risk loosing important moments–moments that you may want to listen to again.
I monitored and archived the FTAA coverage and the DC IMC’s coverage of anti-inaugural actions last January by simultaneously recording the output of the mp3 stream using a audio recording/editing program (like Sound Forge or Cool Edit). That yields decent results, but because you’re essentially doing a digital->analog->digital conversion, there is some slight sonic degradation. This degredation is worse the lower the bitrate of the original stream, and can get much worse if you compress that audio again as an mp3 or RealAudio file.
That’s where a new open source application called Streamripper comes in handy. Now in version 1.2.6 this program allows you to store a streaming mp3 right to your harddrive, without any analog conversion stage, so that the file you have on your harddrive is the same quality that was streamed to you. Especially with lower bitrate mp3 streams, that should make it fairly easy to keep an entire weekend’s worth of broadcasts on your harddrive for future reference and listening.
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