Query

Margaret is determined — and I mean that in the nicest possible way — to listen to the King’s College Chapel service of Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, broadcast on Radio Three. The problem would be matching up that event with our family (who will be in church from about 9 to 12 Central Time). I can buy the Pro version of Wiretap, if necessary, though I’d be a shade uneasy about trying it for the first time on a one-time digital broadcast. Any other clever ideas?


Response to our plea was rapid, farflung, and generous. Simon, Maggi, Rick, and Tom pointed us to Radio Four’s “Listen Again” feature (very sneaky, those English — it’s on Radio Four today, rebroadcast on Radio Three tomorrow).

Mark pointed us to the useful application Radiotastic, and Steve endorsed RadioHijack (and used it to record the service in case we couldn’t catch it online — not only a captivating author, but a sweetie!).

In the end, we tuned in at this address and satisfied Margaret’s near-biological need to hear a treble soloist sing “Once in Royal David’s City” this afternoon. Many heartfelt thanks to all who extended themselves on our behalf.


J. Alva added a small mountain of helpful advice:

I’ve collected some Mac-specific audio freeware links which may be
useful to you. They come with the same caveat you posted, though I use
them all regularly without any trouble.

There’s also this marvelous Free Software portal at Wikipedia, which
is a good place for people to start hunting for other platforms and
other types of applications.

Here’s the Mac stuff. The blurbs are taken from the developers’ pages.

Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files.

When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in
flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully
extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no
error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in
comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the
error-correcting power of cdparanoia.

Once the audio is extracted, Max can generate audio in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey’s Audio, WavPack, Speex, AIFF, and WAVE.

[And another:]

xACT is a Mac OS X GUI front end for the unix applications Shorten, shntool, monkey’s audio compressor, flac and cdda2wav with paranoia and much more.

[And:]

iPodDisk isn’t a tool that copies songs from iPods; instead, it enables other applications to do so by emulating an iDisk drive. After it starts, iPodDisk automatically opens a Finder window.

You can browse, drag from, or even play music directly on the drive.
From a user’s perspective, there’s no difference between the emulated
drive and regular local folders, with the exception that iPodDisk
drive is read-only.

J. Alva’s intercession won an angel its wings. Zuzu would be proud.

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