Converting radio recordings to MP3

gomezz

gomezz

Well-Known Member
I have been having a play today and found how to copy radio programme recordings to my laptop to convert them to MP3 format and put them on my MP3 player, something which I have long been used to doing with my Topfield 5800:-

1) Use the Browse Media Files in Raydon's web interface to download the recordings to my laptop;

2) Do a global rename of the files on the laptop from *.ts to *.rec;

3) Run the batch file utility REC2MP3 (available from the Toppy user site) to convert the files to MP3 format;

4) Synchronise to the MP3 player (I use Windows Media Player) as normal.

I did try MPEGStreamclip to do the conversion but this choked on the *.ts files and produced a very odd output file.

I have edited the standard REC2MP3 batch file to add a REN *.ts *rec command and to remove the PAUSE which was needing me to hit Enter after converting every file.

Hope this helps someone, somewhere. For me it now means I can send my Toppy off to have some TLC by having the capacitors replaced on the PSU and still not miss my daily dose of Radcliffe and Maconie. :)
 
Thanks for this but having a few problems....

I can't find out how to go a global rename with vista or w7. I'm sure it's simple but cant even find how on google!

how do you edit the batch file to avoid the pauses, please?

gomezz said:
I have been having a play today and found how to copy radio programme recordings to my laptop to convert them to MP3 format and put them on my MP3 player, something which I have long been used to doing with my Topfield 5800:-

1) Use the Browse Media Files in Raydon's web interface to download the recordings to my laptop;

2) Do a global rename of the files on the laptop from *.ts to *.rec;

3) Run the batch file utility REC2MP3 (available from the Toppy user site) to convert the files to MP3 format;

4) Synchronise to the MP3 player (I use Windows Media Player) as normal.

I did try MPEGStreamclip to do the conversion but this choked on the *.ts files and produced a very odd output file.

I have edited the standard REC2MP3 batch file to add a REN *.ts *rec command and to remove the PAUSE which was needing me to hit Enter after converting every file.

Hope this helps someone, somewhere. For me it now means I can send my Toppy off to have some TLC by having the capacitors replaced on the PSU and still not miss my daily dose of Radcliffe and Maconie. :)
Click to expand...
 
Using something like WinFF sounds easier to me, but I do not have a FOXSAT-HDR.

The default WinFF conversion for MP3 is 160k. You can just drag and drop a whole folder's contents to convert. It remembers the details for your last conversion apart from where you want the converted files to be written to. It uses FFmpeg which is embedded in the WinFF download.
This means that you can just download WinFF and convert to a reasonable quality MP3 with absolutely no flaffing about.

The link is http://winff.org/html_new/ .

The WinFF design makes it easy for someone with very limited technical experience to use. If you want it is possible to go deeper and tinker.
It provides some GUI tabs for tinkering e.g. the conversion start and stop times.
It also allows you to setup stored FFmpeg commands of your own choosing. Fortunately this ability is not obvious so it will not confuse any one from using WinFF for the first time.
 
merlin777 said:
I can't find out how to go a global rename with vista or w7. I'm sure it's simple but cant even find how on google!
Click to expand...

Start--> cmd.exe.

cd relevant folder

ren *.ts *.rec


OR, download Oscar's Renamer, which allows you to view the file list as a file. Do a search/replace and then commit the changes.

Oscar's Renamer
 
avconv, http://libav.org/avconv.html is VERY easy to use and works well for me using Ubuntu Linux V12.04. It can also be used in Windows according to the website info.

In Ubuntu find the application in the Repository under "libav-tools". Dead easy!

In Linux, in a terminal window:

for a single file:
avconv -i infile.ts outfile.mp3

for a batch of files, something like:
for file in *.TS; do avconv -i "$file" "$file.mp3"; done
will convert all the *.TS files in a folder.

No doubt Windows use would be something similar.

(Alternatively, and the method that I use, copy files using portable hard disk. This has the advantage that a whole batch can be converted together. So for example, I can leave the Hummy to collect a set of episodes of a radio play, convert to *.mp3 using the batch convert above and then move onto my Samsung for listening over my Bluetooth headphones. Brilliant!)
 
I should add that rec2mp3 now recognises and convertes *.ts files as well as *.rec files so the batch file does the job simply by double clicking on it once the recordings have been transferred across (and renamed to makes them easy to order and find on the MP3 player).
 
Luke said:
Using something like WinFF sounds easier to me, but I do not have a FOXSAT-HDR.

The default WinFF conversion for MP3 is 160k. You can just drag and drop a whole folder's contents to convert. It remembers the details for your last conversion apart from where you want the converted files to be written to. It uses FFmpeg which is embedded in the WinFF download.
This means that you can just download WinFF and convert to a reasonable quality MP3 with absolutely no flaffing about.

The link is http://winff.org/html_new/ .

The WinFF design makes it easy for someone with very limited technical experience to use. If you want it is possible to go deeper and tinker.
It provides some GUI tabs for tinkering e.g. the conversion start and stop times.
It also allows you to setup stored FFmpeg commands of your own choosing. Fortunately this ability is not obvious so it will not confuse any one from using WinFF for the first time.
Click to expand...
Thanks, Luke. WinFF does the job. Easy to use and easy to install. Although I only did one file it looks easy enough to do a list. I think it might be a bit slow but I'm not really bothered with that - just happy to get something that works for me!

I'm a little bit curious about the default bit rate of 160. I thought it ran in multiples of 32 so the choices would be 128 or 256. How do we arrive at 160? (my radio recordings are spoken voice sitcoms with a little bit of incidental music).

I'm also getting the following errors:

PES packet size mismatch
incomplete frame
error while decoding stream, invalid data found when processing input

but the resulting file seems to play ok so i'm going to ignore them...
 
merlin777 said:
I'm also getting the following errors:

PES packet size mismatch
incomplete frame
error while decoding stream, invalid data found when processing input

but the resulting file seems to play ok so i'm going to ignore them...
Click to expand...

Getting 1 small set of errors near the end of the recording is common due to the way that the timers come to an abrupt end.

If you are getting errors earlier in the recording then that indicates that your recepiton was not perfect when the recording was taking place.
 
merlin777 said:
I'm a little bit curious about the default bit rate of 160. I thought it ran in multiples of 32 so the choices would be 128 or 256. How do we arrive at 160? (my radio recordings are spoken voice sitcoms with a little bit of incidental music).
Click to expand...

There are many accepted bit rates for MP3 files from 8K to 192K and beyond, some may not be playable on all players though, I would say that for spoken voice 160K is if anything too high, especially if a smaller file size is of interest to you. I encoded a BBC radio series from the 1950's in 56K mono where a 30 Min. episode took up only 12 kBytes and was still O.K. to listen to
 
The bitrate is a very personal thing. In my case I've tried a few of the BBC voice podcasts and most have been frustrating compared to the freeview version.

160K is just a compromise. For Radio 1, 2 and 3 compared to what is broadcast it is probably too low especially as they are broadcast in 192k.
While for World Service a mono conversion would be more appropriate e.g. -acodec libmp3lame -b:a 96k -ac 1 -ar 44100

merlin777 said:
How do we arrive at 160? (my radio recordings are spoken voice sitcoms with a little bit of incidental music).
Click to expand...

Open WinFF and select 'Preset' from the Edit option in the Menu bar (near the top left). This will display the Edit Preset panel. Click on Audio in the left hand pane and then mp3 in the right hand pane. This will display the default preset command for WinFF's Audio/MP3 showing the default as 160Kb.

Now that you have used WinFF have you tried turning on the additional menu driven options? Open WinFF and select 'Additional Options' from the Options option in the Menu bar. This will add a number of tabs next to the Output tab. It saves having to muck about with the presets for some of the common occasional tweaks.
One of the extra tabs is an Audio tab. This is useful for trying different bitrates without having to delve into editing or adding to the presets. E.g. if for producing 96k mono enter 96 into the Audio Bitrates box and 1 into the Audio Channels box.

I have just tried putting in 54 and 1 for a programme that was originally 192Kb, Joint stereo. The resulting MP3 was an mp3 of 56Kb mono.
 
Ezra Pound said:
I encoded a BBC radio series from the 1950's in 56K mono where a 30 Min. episode took up only 12 kBytes and was still O.K. to listen to
Click to expand...
I think a 30 minute playback from a 12KB file is rather optimistic - that's only about 7 bytes per second.
 
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