StreamRipperX Editor's Review

StreamRipperX is an Open Source application that can rip various audio streams.

The project is based on StreamRipper, an Open Source application that works on Linux and Windows. The application is not under active development, so this is the maximum that you can get from it at the moment.

The interface of the application is well structured into tabs that give you quick access to all of its features. The 'General' tab provides most of the features that are related to the stream management.

The 'General' tab has a menu that has some graphical buttons. These buttons allow you to add/delete streams, structure them by directories, start/stop the ripping process, or you can listen to the music that you are currently ripping from a real-time generated relay stream. Unfortunately, these buttons are not pretty intuitive, so it takes some time before you can learn how to use them. The good part is the fact that they have tool tips on mouse-over.

The 'Download' tab gives you the possibility to customize the way how your files would appear on your hard drive. You must provide a path to a directory where you have write access. You can set the application to create a directory for each radio station, to overwrite the recorded songs if by any chance a song is replayed by the radio, to add sequence numbers to the songs, and to add a ID3 tag to the MP3 files.

The 'Network' tab provides some advanced features such as: custom User Agent, the local port for the relay stream, the possibility to scan for another port if another application listens on the port that you are trying to open, or you can set a proxy URL. The custom User Agent feature, also known as User Agent spoofing, is pretty useful in case some of the streaming servers block the stream rippers.

The ripping process goes quite smooth as the application won't use many system resources. The resulted audio material is automatically split by the application, so you won't get a huge single file as output from StreamRipperX.

Pluses: it gives you the possibility to rip your favorite radio streams, it has some advanced features.

Drawbacks / flaws: the buttons from the 'General' tab are not very inspired.

In conclusion: even though StreamRipperX is not under active development, it is a very good product.

version reviewed: 1.0.5