HPR4287: Schedule audio recordings on the command line

Hacker Public Radio

TuxJam co-host Kevie does a follow up show to episode 4249 with a look at scheduling a stream recording using crontab and the ffmpeg command. The two things that we will need to set this up are the audio stream url and the time of the show. To set this up we need to go setup a new Cron task: crontab -e and navigate to the bottom of the file. The first thing that it will expect you to enter is the timing for this task, this will be written as * * * * * with the information needed being converted into an appropriate number: minute hour day of month month day of week (0-59) (0-23) (1-31) (1-12) (0-7) * * * * * Then we need to enter ffmpeg -i followed by the stream URL. It is important that we include the duration of the recording, so that this doesn't output a huge file. To set the time enter -t HH:MM:SS making sure to replace the HH(hours) MM(minutes) and SS(seconds) with numbers. Almost done. The last thing we need to do is to enter the location for the file to go along with the name /path/filename.ogg. So in short form the command is * * * * * ffmpeg -i https://streamurl -t HH:MM:SS /path/filename.ogg. The example used in the show for Dan Lynch's Mid Week Pick and Mix: 00 19 * * 4 ffmpeg -i https://arrowestream.radioca.st/;?ver=737183.mp3 -t 02:00:00 ~/Recordings/DanLynchPickMix.ogg