I used to love listening to Brave New Waves on CBC 2 when I was writing my thesis. Tonight I tried Amarok for the first time, and as I was going through the stations I noticed that there was no CBC 2 stream.

Checking the CBC, their CBC 2 OGG stream still isn't working (it hasn't been working in years). Still, they say mplayer can download their streams, so I wrote a little function to download 4 hours of it... and it didn't work... so I rewrote it... and rewrote it... and kept rewriting it for far too long.

Anyway, I have a working version now... it records off 4 hours of the Windows Media Player stream to a .asx file. Mplayer seems to be the only thing that can read the resulting file. I burned quite a bit of time trying to get it to record out the audio and then encode it to mp3 so I could put it into the Amarok playlists. No luck there. Lame just can't seem to read the .wav that mplayer produces with -dumpaudio.

I was trying to do batched recordings (i.e. 8 half-hour recordings), but without the separate encoding that's not very useful. I'll probably want to make the recording do rotations (so that they don't fill up the hard-disk) at some point, but for tonight I have wasted far too much time on this and need to get to sleep.

I was planning to get an extra hour or two of payable work in... sigh.