Using Guayadeque | Radio | Last.fm

Record

Guayadeque can record the radio station you are listening to, either as one file per track or as a single file for the whole session. It is not a general purpose recorder: the Record button is only enabled while a radio station is playing.

Before using it, open Preferences → Record and tick Enable recording. That page is also where you choose the folder the files are saved to, the format (mp3, ogg or flac), the encoding mode (Bitrate/CBR or Quality/VBR), the quality and the automatic deletion of short tracks. The button only appears in the Player Controls after recording is enabled.

To start, play a radio station and click the Record button once (it sits between Stop and the play mode button). Click it again to stop. The hover text of the button always describes the next click — “Record to file” or “Stop recording” — and names the file being written.

While a recording is running:

• The status bar shows a field with the elapsed time and the size of the file being written, for example Recording 00:12:34 · 5.2 MB;
• The caption of the Play Queue panel is marked with — Recording, next to the queue totals;
• Both values belong to the current file, so they restart at every split.

Files and splitting. How many files a recording produces is set by Split tracks in Preferences → Record, which is on by default.

With Split tracks on, each time the stream announces a different track the file being written is closed and a new one is opened, named from the tags that came with the stream:

<Save to>/<station>/<artist> - <title>.mp3

When the stream sends no artist, the name is just the title. The files are closed properly at every split, so their length and seeking information are correct and each one can be played, tagged or moved on its own.

With Split tracks off, the whole recording is a single file, named after the station and the moment the recording started:

<Save to>/<station>/<station> YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.mp3

For example Radio Rock 20261029-213011.mp3, so two recordings of the same station never overwrite each other. That file holds many tracks, therefore it is tagged with the station and the genre only, without an artist or a title. If the stream announces no station, the folder and the name are taken from the stream address instead.

A split takes a fraction of a second and the audio of that instant is not recorded. A split while the playback is paused ends the recording, because the stream has to be running to complete the file being closed. Neither applies when Split tracks is off.

Deleting ads. With Delete tracks shorter than set in Preferences → Record, a file shorter than the given number of seconds is deleted as soon as it is closed — a convenient way to get rid of the ads and the small jingles between the tracks.

Notes. Stopping the playback also stops the recording: the file is closed and tagged with the last information received from the stream. Recording depends on the encoders of the chosen format, MP3 comes from gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly and OGG/FLAC from gstreamer1.0-plugins-base/good.

Using Guayadeque | Radio | Last.fm