Big lip and streaming internet radio...

I awoke this morning to discover that my bottom lip was distended. I was bitten I think by a mosquito who seem to love the 'sweet blood' I have from the UK. It caused me a lot of pain, so I texted my Spanish teacher to say I wasn't attending school today ;-)

Whilst bimbling at home, I set about trying to link up two very useful open source programs - namely StreamTuner and StreamRipper. StreamTuner is an internet radio application that I have grown to love since leaving England. Most music here in Montevideo is Latino so I miss all the different genres. However, StreamRadio (similar to Winamp when using ShoutCast) gives me the ability to listen to a drum and bass station in the UK or for that matter, a folk channel from Finland of all things!

On to StreamRipper - a shell prompt app that is able to listen to the streamed data, save it to an MP3 file and also relays it to localhost:8000 so you can listen as you rip. This is important since if you don't set up the relay locally, you can in fact double the bandwidth you consume. Plus the overhead on the server at the other end. My solution cuts down on that by only taking a single stream and forwarding the data to my XMMS player.

StreamTuner was very useful the other night. We had some friends round from Ale's work and it was beautiful not having to faff around trying to play music from my CD-ripped MP3 collection.