The best stream recorders, downloaders, rippers, etc for Windows 98

[Ed999]

For Windows 9x I find the most useful stream recorder program is -

For recording literally anything that can play through the PC's soundcard, Cool Edit Pro v2. Accompanied by mp3.flt and mpe.flt and mpeg.dat for encoding to mp3; and cool_faac.flt for encoding as MP4 Audio (M4A). But it should be used with Asio4All v2.9.


For Windows 9x I find the most useful stream downloader programs are -

For RTSP (RealPlayer) streams, StreamboxVCR Suite 2 for on-demand RealAudio and RealVideo and RAM streams. Works for live streams as well as on-demand streams. I also recommend the useful editor program MetaEditor.

For MMS (Windows Media) streams, for on-demand streams, SDP v2.0.0 (the Streaming Download Project mms downloader).

For stream-ripping live SHOUTcast audio streams, Winamp v5.06 with StationRipper. StreamRipper usually gets the position of track changes wrong if the tracks are cross-faded, with no gap between them; but StationRipper just makes a continuous recording and you get to choose the break points later, in the editing.

For RTMP (Macromedia Flash) streams, RTMPDUMP v2.1d (combined with RTMPSRV v2.1d) for on-demand RTMP and RTMPT streams. For extracting MP4 files (or MP3 files) from a .FLV wrapper, use FFMPEG.

Also for RTMP on-demand streams, Get_iPlayer v2.76 if modified as follows -
(a) Firstly, as described at http://stream-recorder.com/forum/rtmpdump-v2-2d-command-exit-code-1-t6663.html
(b) Secondly, by commenting out its ability to "phone home", to check a site that no longer exists for updates (comment out the 7-line section that hunts for plugin updates, by putting a # mark at the start of each line: to find that section, search the get_iplayer.pl file - using Notepad.exe - for the phrase 'plugins update').

Get_iPlayer is a Perl script (get_iplayer.pl), so you'll need to install ActivePerl.


This posting is optimised for Windows 98 / 98SE / ME.

[Ed999]

Apologies, I hadn't intended to advertise warez in my previous posting.

I didn't realise that ActivePerl fell into that category. It was recommended to me, as being simply a better version of Perl than I was using. But I can't now recall which version of Perl I was originally trying out.

I think the freeware Get_iPlayer.pl script will run on almost any version of Perl. The installer which that script was originally distributed with (but which is no longer available on the Get_iPlayer site) included some or other version of Perl, and I originally used that. But the script was NOT designed to run on only a specific type of Perl.

[Ed999]

As for Cool Edit Pro v2.0 for Windows 98, that program is no longer being developed, nor is it possible to buy it (for any O/S).

Support for Windows 98 has been completely withdrawn: all subsequent versions of the software (the only ones now sold) require Windows XP or later.

On the basis that its developer no longer sells any Windows 98 software, and hence the only source of that software is second hand versions on eBay etc, I had presumed that the Windows 9x version 2.0 is classed as abandonware.