stream rippers, how do they work?

[TreeFinger]

how do applications that rip music off of internet radio stations work?

[slavik]

it's a player that instead of sending the data to the audio subsystem, saves it to a file.

[TreeFinger]

it's a player that instead of sending the data to the audio subsystem, saves it to a file.


This interests me. Where can I start to write my own program to do this?

[SledgeHammer_999]

Hmmm the easier method IMO is gstreamer. Just construct a pipeline that plays a radiostation but the final "elemant/plugin" in the pipeline(preferably before any decoding takes place) should write to disc and NOT send data to the audio system. Take a look at "filesink" element.

[lswb]

This interests me. Where can I start to write my own program to do this?

You could take a look at the code for an open source program like streamripper at

http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/