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Do you like to listen to online radio stations? One of the biggest advantages of the Internet is that you can listen to radio stations from all over the world. You can find any type of music easily, because there are thousands of free internet radio stations. But what happens if you want to record your favorite songs for future listening? Since the conventional players don’t offer tools for the handling of radio broadcasts, you will need some additional software to make records.

Here I will try to represent an easy way to record music from online radio stations, using Winamp.

There are many programs, offering the possibility to record online music, but maybe the most easiest way is using Winamp. The only thing you need is to install a little plugin for Winamp called StreamRipper. It is completely free and works excellent. The main advantages of this plugin is the ability to record while you listen to the selected online radio and also separating the entire broadcast to individual songs as it skips the ads.

The installation is  elementary. Just download and start the .exe file. After installation of the plugin and starting of Winamp you will notice a new icon in the tray and a new gray window appearing along with the player.

If for some reason the plugin window doesn’t appear, then maybe it isn’t automatically started. In such case you can start it manually by selecting Options > Preferences from the Winamp toolbar. Then from the menu on the left, in the Plugins section  select General Purpose and click twice on Srtreamripper For Winamp. You will see is a small window with only one option saying Enable Srtreamripper. Check it and click OK.

All settings are available from plugin main panel with pressing the Options button. Most of them can be left with their default values but there are few settings that you must pay attention to.

Try to reconnect to the stream if it drops – it allows the plugin to connect automatically to the stream if it is disconnected.

Don’t rip over X megs – not to record files larger than a certain size.

Megs – determine the maximum allowed size of individual files.

Output directory – here you can specify the folder where you want to store the recorded files.

Rip to separate files – allows you to determine whether to create separate files or not.

There are other options but these are more essential and important ones.
With these settings, in the selected folder for storing the recorded files, will be created separate folders for each radio station that you listen to.

If you play any radio station in Winamp, its address will be displayed in the plugin window, like the one below.

It means that you are ready to record. Just press Start and the process will begin. If everything is alright you will see a window similar to the following.

Notice: If the plugin does not separate the stream of individual files, although this option is enabled, it is most likely due to a lack of meta-information ( i.e. missing ID3 tag information for the track ) and Streamripper doesn’t know how to split the stream. You can manually manage the process through the buttons Start and Stop, but it is possible recorded songs to be placed in a folder incomplete. In such case you can check the option Never overwrite files in incomplete folder (as shown above) otherwise every time you press Start your recorded song will be overwritten and you will have only one song recorded.

Streamripper only supports the following formats: MP3, OGG, AAC, and NSV. If you run a radio, which is in another format, Streamripper will not detect it.