FStream: Like a PVR for streaming audio and web radio
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Media, Review, Software Thursday May 15, 2008FStream is an interesting piece of software that has probably escaped the attention of many Mac OS X users in the English-speaking world, because its web site is entirely in French. It’s a small program that makes it possible to listen to, and to easily record Web radio stations and audio streams.
Features of FStream are as follows:
- Decoding of streams in any of these formats: OGG Vorbis, AAC/AAC+, MP3, MMS (ASF for WMA)
- Encoding of the streams to any of these formats: MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV
- Recognizes the Apple infrared remote control
- Very low CPU usage
- Minimalist Interface: Simple to use, and does not take much display space
- Customizable interface
- Great flexibility in recognition of streams (among other things, IceCast and ShoutCast streams)
- Access to pre-selected lists (ShoutCast and SourceMac)
When they say minimalist interface, they aren’t kidding - there’s a lot more to this software than you might think at first glance. Normally, this is all you see on the screen:
We should note that if you don’t care for the basic style of the interface, there are a number of skins available for download. Anyway, when FStream is the foreground application and you press the SHIFT key, it changes color and now you are at the recording panel:
The button on the left hand side controls playing or pausing the stream unless the SHIFT key is depressed and you’re at the recording panel, in which case it starts or stops recording. Note that in the program preferences you can select whether pausing the audio will simply mute it, or will actually buffer it so that when you un-pause it will play the stream from where you left off (like a PVR). We wish this functionality wasn’t buried in the preferences, but instead was on two separate buttons (or a “split” button as is used on the right side), because there are times when we may want to pause but don’t care that much about what we’re listening to (as when it’s in the middle of a long commercial break) and other times when we really don’t want to miss the discussion on whatever talk show we’re listening to.
As mentioned above, the button on the right hand side of the interface is split into two halves. Clicking on the lower half reveals a volume control slider:
While clicking on the upper half brings up the main menu:
From the main menu you can select Quick Open, which lets you enter (or paste) a stream URL directly:
But most of the time, you’ll probably want to use the Streams Manager, which allows you to select any of a multitude of preset streams, or streams that you have previously saved:
FStream actually has a fairly comprehensive help file (accessed from the top menu bar, and yes, it’s in English if you’ve selected English as your primary language) and it would be a real good idea for you to scan through it if you want to utilize FStream to its fullest capabilities. Also, if you want to visit the author’s web site, we suggest using either Yahoo Babel Fish or Google Translate to translate the page to English (here are links to the translated main FStream page using Yahoo and Google).
FStream is a great FREE program, and it is the only one we know of that will give you the ability to pause live audio streams and/or record them for future listening. The only way it could be made better (other than the aforementioned suggested change in the pause control) would be to actually allow recording on a schedule, so that you could have it automatically start recording your favorite show at the time it begins (and stop when it ends), in case you aren’t home, or simply forget that the show is on. If there is a way to do this with FStream, we haven’t discovered it yet, but if you’ve figured out how to do it please leave a comment and share what you know!
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