This evening, I listened to the most recent Local And/Or General, a weekly 2-hour showcase of new independent/unsigned/live music from Melbourne, for the first time since leaving Melbourne. It's good to hear some good Melbourne bands again. And there were some good things there.
In particular, they played two songs and an interview by a new project named Holidays On Ice, which sounded really good. Holidays On Ice are a project involving numerous Australian musicians, including Angie Hart of Frente!/Splendid and members of a few other bands. They have a new album titled Playing Boyfriends and Girlfriends, which sounds somewhere between Yo La Tengo and Saint Etienne, with bits of Stereolab and Architecture In Helsinki in the mixture as well. I'm probably going to order a copy.
Don't forget at(1); AFAIK, there's no easy way to get cron to understand multiple timezones, whereas with at(1), you can at least do "TZ='foo/bar' at 18:00" or similar.
Now if someone would write an extended cron that can fire off jobs in multiple timezones, it'd make things a lot simpler.
Hmm, might have to check that out. It didn't occur to me that some Frente! might go down well at these things that you play records at.
I haven't played any Frente! recently that I can remember. Partly because whenever I'm seized by the urge to play an acoustic version of Bizarre Love Triangle, I prefer Even As We Speak's one.
I wasn't thinking about the bloody cover, though. Or "Accidentally Kelly Street", for that matter, they've got better stuff than that.
I've been capturing RRR streams for a while - I'd love to be able to capture it's Adelaide equivalent, 3D Radio, but they're too poor to pay for streaming bandwidth so I'll have to stick with the Melbourne station. However, an automated system that dumps out beautifully labelled MP3s would be a great improvement - keep us informed.
It won't be MP3s; they only do RealAudio. The files are really small, though (about 14Mb an hour), and mplayer can transcode them to WAV if needed.
One problem is that RealPlayer doesn't play the captured files; I think it doesn't like raw stream data from local disk. mplayer will play the files, though cannot seek in them.
Aah, I've been using mplayer to save the RealAudio, then using it to convert them to wavs, then encoding them to MP3 in LAME, which works well but I haven't got around to automating it yet, and especially not to any kind of scheduler. I just let mplayer rip the station for an hour or so, then quit and start converting.
Transcoding's lossy, though; I'd rather keep it in RealAudio until I need to do otherwise.
I wonder how hard it would be to put proper headers or whatever on the output files so that RealPlayer could read/seek them.
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mplayer and cron are a dangerous mix...