How to record Internet streaming FM radio – Part 1

It took me a while to figure it all out but now I can record streaming FM radio off the Internet. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not really that difficult, just a bit confusing. Here’s a step by step on how to do it.
1. Download XMPLAY from here: http://www.un4seen.com/
2. Unzip the XMPLAY folder, preferably onto your desktop. Once you unzip it, you can keep the folder right in front of you on the desktop since XMPLAY doesn’t install itself on your computer. It just runs when you want it. You can actually run two different instances of it at the same time, more on that later.
3. If you want to record the FM stream in MP3 format, you need LAME (Lame Ain’t Another MP3 Encoder). You’re on your own if you want to use another recording format and don’t ask me how to use something else. Internet FM sounds fine in MP3 and that’s what I use on my MP3 player, hence the name.
Get LAME from here : http://support.xmplay.com/file_comment.php?id=478
4. Unzip LAME and take two files out of the folder that pops onto your desktop after you unzip it. You need the lame.exe file and the lame.dll files in the XMPLAY folder so that XMPLAY can record the stream.
5. Find a station that streams FM over the Internet. I like Dainbramage which is available here:http://www.dainbramage.com/listen/listen1.asx
but you can certainly choose any station that you like. You need the url of the feed, not something like dainbramage.com. The link above is for the actual streaming FM so find it copy and paste it into notepad. Then you don’t have to look for it every time you want to listen to that station, right?
6. XMPLAY plays lots of types of music files but what you want it to do now is to play a url so you can listen to FM radio on the Internet. How do you do that? Easy. On the XMPLAY interface (the window that opens up when you doubleclick on xmplay.exe file, look for the button on the main window that is to the right of the radio control buttons at the bottom, the one that looks like an arrowhead pointing up. That will open the Open File window.
7. Remember the url of the radio station that I asked you to copy back in step 5? Paste that link into the space at the bottom of the open file window.
8. Click Open URL just to the right of the space for the url. That’s kind of obvious but this is a step by step, right?
9. XMPLAY will take a few seconds to play, depending on the speed of your Internet connection. There you go! XMPLAY is now streaming FM radio into your computer and, if you have speakers, you can hear it.
10. You can leave it at that or you can record what you are hearing. The next few steps are for recording the stream so stop reading now if you’ve gone far enough.
11. To record, right click on the main window of XMPLAY and choose Options and Stuff. What you are looking for in this window is the last item on the left of the window, Output. Once you click on that, the right window will show Device, second word from the top. Click the down arrow on the right side of that section and choose Encoder Lame.
12. Once you have chosen Encoder Lame, and click Apply, XMPLAY will start to record an MP3 file that will have the name of the station you are recording, dainbramage.mp3 for example. The file will grow in size, depending on how long you are recording. Click the Stop button to stop the recording.
13. Now, as you may have noticed, XMPLAY outputs the stream to LAME and LAME makes an MP3 for you. Cool huh? But wait! Since the stream is going to LAME instead of to your speakers, you can’t listen to the station. Oh woe! What do you do? Next step please.
14. Open up another instance of XMPLAY and listen to the FM station through that one while record your MP3 on the other one.
15. Once you have the recording of what you wanted, you can move it to another folder to listen to or rename it to something else, otherwise XMPLAY will just record over that file the next time you decide to record the FM stream. Rename it or lose it, ok? You’be been warned.
That’s it in 15 very easy steps. If you want to record streaming FM radio from the Internet, I’ve just taught you how to do it….for free! What a guy. Thanks for reading.

Add an wireless access point – Extend your wireless coverage

If you’re like me, but who is, you’ve probably got more than one wireless router in a box somewhere. I used a DLink DIR-615 wireless router as my main unit. While the coverage is pretty good, I am often in my basement office which is down one floor and across the house from my wireless router, a distance of only about 50 feet but there is a hardwood floor and a concrete wall in the way. Sure, I can use my laptops in my office but throughput is low.

Over the years, as I’ve upgraded my routers, I’ve kept one or two. I found a Trendnet TEW-431BRP wireless router and decided to see how hard it would be to add that to my existing network to increase the range. There are some pretty good ‘how to’ articles out there and I used this one to set mine up.

The only materials you require are the second wireless router and some Ethernet cable, the length of which is up to you. My network is set up with the DSL modem in the basement, the router in my bedroom one floor up and a switch down by the modem in the basement. My main computers are linked to the router itself while the secondary computers are connected to the switch. I decided to connect the second router to my switch and, according to the smart guys at Best Buy, I didn’t need a crossover Ethernet cable. If I had connected the second router directly to the first router, I would have needed a crossover cable. Your mileage may vary in this case. Depending on the router you use as your main one, you might get by with a regular cable, check that the lights are green when you connect it and you might be OK.

Here’s how I did the actual dirty work. Again, your mileage might vary. That means that what worked for me, might not work for you. First, I connected the second router to my laptop with a short length of Ethernet cable. Since the IP address of the second router (SR from now on), I also had to turn off the wireless on the laptop in order to bring up the SR login screen.

Once I had done that, I enter 192.168.0.1 into my browser and was happy to see the splash screen of the SR come up. First things first, I had to change the IP adress of the SR to something other than what it was and to something that wasn’t within the IP range of the first router (FR from now on). Using another computer, I checked to see what the IP range of the FR was. Turns out it was 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.199. Thinking quickly, using my calculator and abacus…just kidding, I set the IP address of the SR to 192.168.0.251 and left the subnet mask the same as it was.

The second step was easy, I turned off the DHCP on the SR. According to my link up above, you can only have one DHCP server on a LAN. Once I had the DHCP turned off, everything was set.

The final step was to connect the SR to the switch with a length of Ethernet cable. Heading back to my wireless laptop, I typed in the new IP address of the router and was happy again to see the splash screen of the SR. Admittedly it doesn’t take much to make me happy.

Once I could access the router, I did two things. First, I had to setup a password for the router, something that everyone should do. If you don’t do this, anyone with half a brain can access your router and change the settings. Next, I had to secure the wireless network using the same encryption key that I was using on my FR.

Now I can roam the house at my leisure knowing that every corner allows me to access the Internet with my wireless laptops. Cool huh?

Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any problems.

What to do with your DVD/CD back-ups

I’ve already covered backing up your DVD and CD collections using cathy.exe. Strangely enough, I ran into a problem with my own advice. Sure, I’d made backups using cathy.exe then I switched computers. I’d already backed up my backups, meaning that I’d put my cathy folder on a DVD. The question now was, where is that DVD?

Here’s a tip that will save you all kinds of grief. Zip up your cathy folder, that would be the one that contains the cathy.exe files and also the files that cathy creates when it catalogs your DVDs and CDs.

Once you have the cathy.zip file, or whatever you want to call it, email it to yourself. Better yet, take my advice in a previous post and use gmail drive to send the zip file up to your gmail account.

This is a very short post but, to me, a very important one. Now I can access my latest cathy.zip file on whatever computer I am using, simply by opening my email account. Thanks for reading!

How to back up your computer – Part 3 Final

In the last post, I explained how to make DVD backups of any important stuff on your computer. Once you’ve done that, you end up with one or more DVDs full of stuff. Cool! But, as we all know, a box or a folder full of stuff is just that. There is no organization to the material in the box or folder.

Here’s where Cathy comes in. Cathy, which is available here, CATHY is the answer to your needs. Ok, not for the box but for the folder or DVD. Download Cathy and unzip the file onto your desktop. It unzips into a folder so just leave the folder there, where you can get at it later.

Cathy sorts out your DVDs quickly and efficiently. Startup Cathy by double clicking on the cathy.exe file. Put your DVD or CD in your drive and wait until your computer figures out that there is something it has to do.

In Cathy’s menu there is a tab which says ‘catalog’. Click it, find the DVD drive (usually D but it might be different on your computer) then click ‘ADD’. Cathy then goes to work and makes some sense of what you have on that particular CD/DVD. All of the folders and files are itemized and sorted out with a file that Cathy saves for you. Right now is a good time to sync your CD/DVD with Cathy. Cathy will save the file that corresponds to your CD/DVD and name it EXACTLY the same as the CD/DVD title. If you’ve left it as the generic name, it will be indecipherable, just a bunch of numbers. If you have made a title for the DVD, something like Nancy’s backup DVD, then it will save it as that. Mark the DVD with that name so you can find it later on.

What I do, and this is just what I have found to be efficient, is to start with A1 or even just 1. I change the name of the Cathy file to 1 or A1, then I mark the DVD with the same name. Later on, when I search for a file and Cathy tells me it’s on DVD 1 then it’s a simple matter to find DVD 1 and put it into the DVD drive and find what I’m looking for.

I should say that Cathy simply makes an image of the CD/DVD file structure, complete with all the file names in each folder. You can’t open any of the files unless the corresponding CD/DVD is in the drive. It’s like the menu in a restaurant or the index of a book, it has a list of everything on the CD/DVD but not the folders and files themselves.

That’s it! Backup your computer often and keep track of the CD/DVDs that you create with Cathy.

Next time I will talk to you about Dropbox. Stay tuned.

How to back-up your computer – what is a back-up anyway? Part 2

Once you figure out whether you want to do a back up or not, you have to figure out where the things are that you want to back up. I save lots of things from the Internet, movies, pics, whole pages and, in some cases, whole web sites. Since I can’t be bothered to look around for everything on my computer, I save everything to my desktop. If you do that, of course, it doesn’t take long to get a very cluttered desktop.

A solution for this is to make a new folder on your desktop. Right click, new, folder then name it something you’ll remember. In my case, I call it STUFF. My Stuff folder is full of everything I save, all the flv files from youtube (that I never watch again), all of the pics I save from, ahem, educational sites, and things that other people send me on msn or QQ. Every now and then I check the size of this folder, right click then choose properties, and if the folder is up around four gigabytes, then I ‘back it up’!

Burnaware is my weapon of choice for burning CDs and DVDs. Not only is it free but it works quickly and efficiently and does just what it says it does, without screwing up everything else. As far as media goes, I use DVDs almost exclusively. There are two reasons for this, the first being that a DVD holds a helluva lot of stuff and, second, because they are cheaper to buy here in Canada than CDS. Our useless politicians in Ottawa have decided to tax CDs because everyone uses them to rob and cheat musicians, right? It’s not right but the idiots in power think this will actually help the poor starving artists around the world. Anyway, DVDs are cheap here. If I get a deal, I can buy ten DVD blanks for about $1.50. I buy hundreds at a time so I always have a stock of fresh blanks for these backups.

Burnaware burns the DVD quickly then I go through the DVD which I have just written and make sure that everything on it can be read. If you burn a lot of DVDs you will know that sometimes a burn goes bad. Sometimes a burn goes bad and you don’t even know it. For this reason I always double check that my computer can read the disk. If the things you are backing up are REALLY important, then you might want to make double copies and check the burned DVDs on another computer before you delete the original material.

I should say here, again, that a back up does two things. It can clear up space on your hard drive, and it saves important things from being lost if your hard drive crashes. I don’t really have a problem with space on my drives so, while I back up my important stuff frequently, I also like to have it around to work with, too. How do I keep track of it all? Well, remember my ‘STUFF’ folder? If I burn it to a DVD then I simply rename the folder to ‘Stuff – Already Burnt’ so I know not to burn it again. And, obviously, I don’t add anything more to that folder. I just create a new ‘stuff’ folder and start again.

Next time I will explain how to use Cathy to organize your back ups. Stay tuned!

a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun