converting rm to mp3 via cron issue

[Paul Ward]

Hi all,

I am trying to convert a rm stream captured from the bbc as a .rm to mp3.
The idea being I can convert a bbc show like the charts to mp3 and
have it moved to the webserver for download on my work machine in
another country. I found 40k was just about bearable in quality, for
the smallest size possible.

The capture part works well but when  try to convert the file it only
converts 400k before stopping when run from a cron job. when I run it
on a comand line it works as esxpected.
Can anyone suggest a work around for this?

Would it be best to split my script and call the conversion as a separate one.

#Capture is:

SHOWNAME=$1
DURATION=$3
DURATION=`expr $DURATION \* 60`
BITRATE="40k"

mplayer -dumpstream "-playlist"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/realaudio/media/r1live.ram -dumpfile
${RECORDINGPATH}${SHOWNAME}.dump -vc dummy -vo null & MPLAYPROCESS=$!
 sleep $DURATION

#conversion part:
ffmpeg -i "$RECORDINGPATH$SHOWNAME".dump -f wav - | lame - -b $BITRATE
$WEBDIR/${DATE}_"$SHOWNAME".mp3

I am using ffmeg as I can encode to wav then mp3 in one go.
mencoder did not seem to want to work this way and I ended up with
huge wav files, which after a 3 hour recording is too big on disk.

If anyone has any other ideas let me know.