Realrekord v.0.9
Thanassis Misaridis <tmi@loa.espci.fr>,<tmi@oersted.dtu.dk> January 2003

PURPOSE

Realrekord is a RealPlayer recorder, or in other words allows you to convert rm files to other formats such as wav/mp3/ogg.
It is also a RealPlayer station database.

IMPORTANT!

Please check the laws in the country you live to make sure you are not violating any COPYRIGHTS, before you use Realrekord!

REQUIREMENTS

Standard OSS (/dev/dsp for sound). Test with: ls /dev/dsp
LD_PRELOAD enviromental variable and permissions for setuid programs on your system. Test presence with: strings -f -a /lib/ld | fgrep LD_PRELOAD
sox - comes with almost all distributions. Test presence with: which sox
(optional) lame, bladeenc or oggenc if you want to save recordings in compressed mp3/ogg formats
RealPlayer :-)

DESCRIPTION

Apart from being a recorder, Realrekord allows you to maintain a RealPlayer station database with the following features:

Add, edit or delete stations from the database
Keep a list of favorite stations with custom icons
Simple search for a station in the database

Realrekord v0.9 comes with Radio Station Database v1.1 (Nov.20, 2002) having 2609 radio stations.

The recording part of Realrekord uses vsound 0.5, written by Erik de Castro Lopo <erikd@zip.com.au>. It has been slightly modified to read Realrekord configuration settings.

Vsound "...allows you to record the output of any standard OSS program (one that uses /dev/dsp for sound) without having to modify or recompile the program. It uses the same idea as the esddsp wrapper from the Enlightened Sound Daemon (in fact, vsound is based on esddsp). That is, it preloads a library that intercepts calls to open /dev/dsp, and instead returns a handle to a normal file. It also intercepts ioctl's on that file handle and logs them, to help convert the audio data from its raw form. Vsound then uses sox to convert the raw data to the desired file format.

The upshoot of this is that instead of playing sound to the sound card in your computer, the data is recorded to a file. This is similar to if you connected a loopback cable to the line in and line out jacks on your sound card, but no DA or AD conversions take place, so quality is not lost...."

Recording features:

Save recording in user-specified location in wav format
Convert recordings to compressed formats - mp3, ogg (depending on the converters found on the system)

SAMPLING RATE NOTE:
If your recordings have wrong sampling rate, check the "Station is Mono" checkbutton under Options. If the sampling rate is still wrong,
open $HOME/.kde/share/config/realrekordrc and under [Options] modify the following line: SamplingRate=11025
Defaults are 11025 for stereo stations and 5512 for mono stations.

CONTRIBUTE!

Report bugs to <tmi@oersted.dtu.dk>
If you edit the station database file (.rdb) (broken links/ wrong info/ new stations), send it to me to update it in the following version. Your rdb file should be in $HOME/.kde/share/apps/realrekord/realrekord.rdb
Translation file in your language (.po)

Enjoy!

Thanassis
tmi@oersted.dtu.dk
tmi@loa.espci.fr