Can Audacity do this? rip radio into separate tracks

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I’ve barely scratched the surface of Audacity’s capabilities.

Can it record an internet radio stream (suspect the answer to this is yes) AND separate the tracks into individual mp3’s for each song like some programs are able to do? Suspect no on this but would love to be pleasantly surprised.

2

The answer is indeed yes, I do this a lot. See this tutorial in the manual: Audacity Manual

Not automatically - but you can do this by adding labels and then using Export Multiple. I place labels with the shortcut Ctrl+M while I am recording or playing back.

See these pages in the manual: Audacity Manual and Audacity Manual

WC

3

Thanks for the info. Much as I expected. There are paid programs that will rip individual tracks from a stream and embed track info. Also an opensource, “Streamripper” that will do the same as an addon to Winamp but has not been updated in a long time. I tried Streamripper recently and it did the job imperfectly as it would always start the track partway into the song. I suspect the streaming has been altered in some way that makes this happen. Not sure if the paid programs have found a workaround. I suppose it’s also possible that this is not true for all stations but only for the one I was recording. Have to check that…

4

I wonder about the ability of the paid-for apps to properly divide up radio broadcasts into individual tracks as there is not silence between the tracks there is DJ “chat” and sometimes cross-fade (unlike an LP or tape transcription where the inter-track gap is silent enough for reasonably efficient track detection).

And surely you would want to edit out the DJ chat - and implement good fade-in/out?

WC

5

Your mention of “StreamRipper” sheds light on your question.
No, Audacity can’t do that.

StreamRipper works by directly connecting to the Internet stream and reading the embedded metadata, then automatically splitting the stream according to that metadata. (Streamripper - How it works). That can only work if (a) the stream includes the necessary metadata, (b) the metadata is in a format that is correctly understood by StreamRipper (c) the Internet stream is accessed directly as an encoded data stream.

The final point makes it impossible for Audacity. The way that Audacity records Internet audio streams is to access the data from the sound card (via “Stereo Mix” or “WASAPI loopback”). The sound card decodes the data into audio, and then Audacity records the audio. By the time that the data stream has been converted to audio, the metadata has been stripped out, so there is no way that Audacity can get that data.