Recording FM Radio
A good audio source is of course your local radio stations. Sometimes, however, I want to listen to shows at a time other than when they are broadcast.
Using an FM radio tuner on the computer, you can capture the audio from the radio signal and save it to a sound file, such as MP3.
I'm using the DLink DSB-R100 tuner. It is a small FM radio which connects to the PC using USB for the tuning commands and the sound card's line-in connector for the audio.
The DSB-R100 has a driver already included in the Linux 2.4 kernel, using the V4L video-for-Linux system.
I'm using the fmtools software for Linux to select stations, with my own recording script. I created a script combining sox to record and lame to encode to MP3.
Since FM radio is limited in bandwidth to 15Khz, the compression can be improved a little by having the sound software do some filtering to match. This is the --lowpass option in lame.
Links:
- Linux radio timeshift how-to by Todd Veldhuizen. My script is similar in structure to the example provided by him.
- Gary Burd's fmcapture with software.
- Linux Gazette article