Streaming Windows Media Player support on the Mac is really bad. Its slow, buggy; simply horrible. However, I really wanted to listen to a show which I could only listen to via streaming WMA format. I started searching the net for a solution and found Mplayer. It worked fairly well, but I really like the ability to skip parts of the show which isn’t possible with a streaming WMA.

I kept searching for a way to download the streaming WMA and put it into a WMA file on my hard drive. Mplayer came though again, using the Mplayer command line utility you can easily download the streaming audio to your hard-drive. The Mplayer command line utility is actually included in the Mplayer OS X GUI application, but, its hidden deep inside the .app package. You can find it here:

[code]/Applications/MPlayer OS X 2.app/Contents/Resources/mplayer.app/Contents/MacOS/mplayer[/code]

Just for convenience’s sake I made a symlink to the command line application in my /usr/bin/ with the following command:

[code]sudo ln -s “/Applications/MPlayer OS X 2.app/Contents/Resources/mplayer.app/Contents/MacOS/mplayer” /usr/bin/mplayer[/code]

To download the stream you use the -dumpstream & -dumpfile options with the mplayer command line app, so the final command to download the stream to your HD is:

[code]mplayer -dumpstream “mms://domain.com/stream” -dumpfile ~/Desktop/stream.wma[/code]

The above command will download the stream located at “mms://domain.com/stream” onto a file named “stream.wma” located on your desktop. Althougn I haven’t tested it this method should work with other types of streams besides WMA. The only downside I’ve found is that it will download the stream in real-time, so if the stream is 10min long, it will take 10min to download onto your computer. Besides that, this method seems to work great.

I also figured I post links to some resources that I found while searching for a solution:

• List of Stream Recorders
• mssclient & its OS X GUI wrapper ASFRecorder X (Although these apps look good, I coudn’t get either of them to work)
• MMS Protocol Specification