Ever wanted to record your favourite Internet radio station? Or is there an audio stream on a Web site that you want to capture? Now you can – easily and for free. Recently, I was e-mailed by a reader asking for a great program to do exactly this. I went hunting around, and found a great little compact program.
After tesing a bunch of programs, I liked SDP the best. Many other programs that I tested were big files, hard to use, and a lot of them weren’t free (and not worth paying for). SDP is the opposite of all of the above.
With SDP, you can enter in an Internet URL, and set it to record immidiately, or set a ‘VCR Timer.’ When using a VCR Timer, you’d enter the URL, the time you want it to start, and the time that you want it to stop recording. Also, before recording, you can hit the preview button, to make sure you entered the correct stream URL, etc. Additionally, there is a built-in network monitor to make sure that your network connectivity is functioning properly, to have enough bandwidth available to record a stream. At all times, SDP logs activity. This is very useful, so you can tell if the stream’s server reset, etc. Also, it has an auto reconnect function, so if the server drops, it will continue to record when functioning again (assuming you have set a VCR timer).
The interface of SDP isn’t the nicest that I have seen, but it is not complicated to use at all. When I contacted Paul from the team of programmers, he told me that they are working on the code for a new version that should be released soon.
SDP can be downloaded here. As always, feel free to drop me a line if you have any article suggestions, or a question about this article.
