Recording Internet Radio & Chinese Learning

This post is intended to show how to use VLC to make MP3 recordings of streaming internet radio stations.  The hardest part is locating and copying the streaming address for your station, once you have this it's very simple from there.  VLC is a free and fully featured video and audio playing tool.  It also has a wide range of related functionality, like playing and recording internet streams.

I record the local Mandarin language radio station AM936 so that I can:

• Have access to pre-recorded Mandarin language listening material wherever I am.
• Listen to a particular part of the broadcast as often as I need to better understand it.
• Save money due to the cost of streaming in New Zealand.

The first step is to open VLC and select the Open Network Stream option in the Media menu (or just hit Ctrl-N, as shown).

Then select the Network panel, paste in the streaming address and click on Stream.

At this point you should hear the streaming radio.  To start recording, click on the record button (the red dot).

VLC will then record the stream with a useful file name within a standard folder.  In my case, and most likely any case, it was in the Music folder under the Libraries folder on the Desktop.

That's pretty simple.

You can make it more complicated by choosing the Convert / Save option shown in the menu in the first screenshot.  But that gets overly messy and buggy.  When I tried it, it refused to encode the stream as an MP4 file, giving an unhelpfully vague message.

Google Translate & Chinese Learning

One of the complaints I had about (perhaps misuing) Google Translate as a language learning tool was that when I looked up words, it just generically listed the meanings.  Did it mean future as a noun or adjective?  I've just noticed that it has been upgraded at some point, and now gives this information.

In this case, I was listening to a recording of a local Mandarin AM radio station.  The speaker kept repeating weilai.  Looking it up in Pablo gave me the match "wèilái"  (未来), but the definitions it gave are the same non-grammatically specific ones that you get in all the free dictionary based products (and up to this point, also Google Translate).

For the same of future reference, here's the current Google Translate output with separated nouns and adjectives:

On a related note, two of the cheap MP3 playing devices that I have accrued over the years also receive and play FM radio.  I'd love to find one that also receives and plays AM radio.

Chinese Character Learning

Managed to find a large cheapish pad of gridded paper for practicing my chinese characters on, at the supermarket over the road. Strangely for all the school stationary, there's nothing approaching the grid paper we have in European countries to learn mathematics on.