There's a killer radio-show on my local radio station that airs from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m every weekday. The problem is that the only chance that I have to listen to it is on my way to school, around 7. As soon as I get out of the car, I have no radio so I miss out, every single day. I'm thinking of setting up a rig that records the show every morning and saves it to my hdd. The ultimate plan is to not spend any money and just use components that I already own, if at all possible. Right now, I have a radio hooked up to my computer's soundcard through the headphones port. The quality is pretty bad, but I figure that there are a few factors involved, the radio and reception, the soundcard, and the software. I'm using Audacity to record the tracks and I have a Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value (WDM) card. I was wondering what kind of advice you guys had since I don't know much about audio at all. Filesize is no object, though mp3 format is preferable. Anything that will go on my iPod is great.
Get a FM radio card (or a FM radio and a supported sound card) that's compatible with Linux, then write a shell script called by cron that uses sox to save the audio as a WAV file, then use LAME to convert it to MP3. If you want, you can even put the card and script on an old PC and make the script automatically copy the file to your new PC.
That's kinda what I was thinking, though I'd rather go with the radio than the radio card at this point. What distro of linux do you suggest? Take into consideration that I've never used Linux before. Anyone also have some suggestions on the matter of quality? My friend pointed out that these files are gonna be a lot bigger than I had previously imagined. The filetype might come into play a lot more now. I will probably have to cut out all of the commercials also.
