A possible Sirius/XM recording solution using a mouse/keyboard macro recording utility

[Jaybe]

Hello.

I have a solution that will work for me and I think it will work for others, too, based on your preferences, priorities, and hardware. In order for me to make this work, however, I need the input of the Applian forum community.

Does anybody know of a good, inexpensive or free, simple mouse/keyboard macro recording utility for the Windows platform? I ask for the following reason.

I’m a Sirius subscriber. A couple months back, I was able to maintain a connection via the Flash-based web interface for 7 hours while I was using Replay A/V to record content using the scheduled recording feature of Replay A/V. This was basically just an experiment to make a few observations and see how long I could maintain the connection without the keep-alive nag screen popping up and without being disconnected. I could have maintained the connection even longer than 7 hours.

The key is this: I observed that as long as I periodically moved the mouse along the tuning bar so that the animation was invoked, the keep-alive nag screen never came up and my connection was never dropped. I never had to click the mouse or choose a different channel. I just had to move the mouse along the tuning bar periodically.

This technique only becomes practical for time-shift audio recording if you have access to some simple macro recording software so that you can have the mouse pointer move along the tuning bar at pre-set intervals. It just needs to move the mouse pointer; there are no MouseDown events. In fact, the beauty and simplicity of this solution is that there are no triggering events at all, like a nag screen, that require sophisticated programming. Just a simple movement of the mouse interacting with the tuning bar will keep the nag screens away.

Can someone please suggest where I can get a macro utility like the one I’ve described here? Also, to Cheryl and the developers at Applian. Do you think it would be possible to create or include some kind of utility that performs the mouse pointer movement action I described without violating legal constraints? If no, then it’s possible that this third party macro recording solution could be to the “audio out” method of Replay A/V recording what the XM Tuner utility (and others) was to the “stream capture” method.

Thank you for your help.

[CharlieSummers]

I have a solution that will work for me and I think it will work for others, too, based on your preferences, priorities, and hardware.

I think you're missing a few things. First off, most people don't want to just listen to the stream, they want to record it. And at specific times when they may or may not be at home. So any real solution must:

1. Launch the web browser, calling the URI of the SiriusXM player
2. Log-in using user's credentials, requiring the macro system to know where these objects are in the flash player.
3. Switch channel to the requested channel.
4. Begin playback.

At this point, Replay A/V (or another application that can record computer-generated data being sent to the sound card) can activate and begin recording. It would be nice if the system could then close down the player, assuming there might be another different channel that needs to be recorded later, but I suppose that wouldn't strictly be necessary for some people.

It doesn't look like a simple macro player will be able to do all that, frankly, although I admit I haven't exactly researched the issue.

[edadks]

Hmmm, something like this might work for some of us.

I wouldn't mind letting the player run 24/7 with the volume down and just have replay record during the times I need, so something like this would be useful to me.

And there'd be a little bonus - if enough people did this, I'm sure it would put a big strain on Sirius's bandwidth with so many people accessing the feeds all day long. They either be forced to provide a lot more bandwidth to satisfy customer demand, or maybe they'd back off and let us use a third party stream server again.

[Jaybe]

I think you're missing a few things. First off, most people don't want to just listen to the stream, they want to record it. And at specific times when they may or may not be at home. So any real solution must:

1. Launch the web browser, calling the URI of the SiriusXM player
2. Log-in using user's credentials, requiring the macro system to know where these objects are in the flash player.
3. Switch channel to the requested channel.
4. Begin playback.

At this point, Replay A/V (or another application that can record computer-generated data being sent to the sound card) can activate and begin recording. It would be nice if the system could then close down the player, assuming there might be another different channel that needs to be recorded later, but I suppose that wouldn't strictly be necessary for some people.

It doesn't look like a simple macro player will be able to do all that, frankly, although I admit I haven't exactly researched the issue.

Hello.

Yes, all good points you make.

I purposely left out some details in my original post in order to focus on the heart of my post, which is to find a macro recorder, and also not to introduce too much information at one time and convolute my original intent by giving too much attention to the actual step-by-step process.

Perhaps, however, I left out a little too much information and that might have made my solution appear not to be viable. I assure you, I, too, am one of the people who wants to record and time-shift Sirius audio programming. I had hoped I inferred that recording and time-shifting was possible in my original post. It is. Here in more detail is how I achieved that.

1. Launch Replay A/V and set it up to schedule a recording using the “Capture by Recording Audio Output” method. Here are some of the settings I used. URL: https://www.siriusxm.com/player/; Type: “General Streaming Audio”; Audio Recording Method: “What U Hear”
   
2. Launch your web browser and manually log-in to the Sirius web-based player on your computer and tune to the Sirius channel of your choice. [Ostensibly, because of the following step, step 3 in this process, you can start the player minutes before or hours before your actual program airs, but you must manually start the player.]
   
3. Launch your macro recording software and have it play back the “tuning bar mouse movement” macro (for lack of a better term) to be run at the pre-set intervals.
   
4. When it’s time for your scheduled show to air, Replay A/V will begin its process. It will attempt to log-in to Sirius, but it can’t. At this point, it doesn’t matter because Replay A/V will detect audio and record what it’s detecting.

Now, under normal circumstances, you can expect only about 60 to 90 minutes of record time until the keep-alive nag screen pops up asking you to click on it. And if you don’t click on it, your recording is finished because the nice folks at Sirius will dump you. However, because of step 3 in the above process, the Replay A/V owner can now walk away, go to work, receive a paycheck and earn money so that s/he can continue to send a small portion of it back to Sirius/XM every month and begin the process anew. Or plant azaleas.

It’s possible (and even likely) that a keyboard/mouse macro recording utility would allow you to add more slick and convenient steps to the above process that would close software, shut-down computers, and maybe even change channels, but if I could simply accomplish only the steps I outlined above, it would serve my own purposes very well and I would be very happy.

What triggered this whole idea was, I used to use a really nice macro recording utility on the Macintosh platform all the way back in the early ‘90s. If I had that utility right now on my Windows machines, I could implement the solution that I have outlined here. I just haven’t needed to use, nor have I now been able to find a small macro utility for Windows.

Are any of you in this forum aware of a macro utility at a reasonable price that may work? I will keep looking, as well.

Thanks, all.

[CharlieSummers]

Are any of you in this forum aware of a macro utility at a reasonable price that may work? I will keep looking, as well.

I personally think this is a terrible kludge. But it took me about three minutes doing the single Scroogle (proxy for the big-G) search "windows freeware macro mouse" and reading a handful of pages last night to find a simple macro recorder, Free Lab's Windows Macro Recorder (freelabs.info - the one I routinely use, AutoHotKey, requires a certain amount of programming knowledge, so I wouldn't recommend it for most users). It will do what little you want; although it seems pretty fussy about repeating the macro, you can't expect perfection in a free application. I tested it overnight on a Windows XP machine, and yes, it'll avoid the the timeout assuming you have your browser window and the player within in the window in exactly the same position as when you recorded the macro. That's about all it'll do, so it's hardly what I'd consider a "solution."

But if you don't mind jumping though all the hoops you mentioned, there you go.

Edit: Wow...the web stream this morning is terrible...pops, cracks, clicks, and all kinds of noise. Remind me again why we're paying up to $13/month for this garbage when Slacker or Pandora have better sound for free?

[edadks]

Well, musicdock seems to be working again and in the past I don't think that timed out very often. I'm running a session now to see how long it will stay on.

If the solution is to stream xm 24/7 and just record when I need to, then I'll do that. Replay can grab the stream (vs audio output), but I think the access key in the url might change now and then so this still isn't a perfect solution.

[Jaybe]

Well, musicdock seems to be working again and in the past I don't think that timed out very often. I'm running a session now to see how long it will stay on.

If the solution is to stream xm 24/7 and just record when I need to, then I'll do that. Replay can grab the stream (vs audio output), but I think the access key in the url might change now and then so this still isn't a perfect solution.

Hi edadks,

I don’t have an iPhone, so this isn’t an option for me. But you made me curious, how are you using MusicDock and your iPhone in conjunction with Replay A/V to capture the stream?

Thank you.

[edadks]

I'm not, I'm using musicdock on my pc. The link is at the bottom of the musicdock page: http://mobile.musicdock.com/

[Jaybe]

I'm not, I'm using musicdock on my pc. The link is at the bottom of the musicdock page: http://mobile.musicdock.com/

Yes, I see that now.

The log-in page isn't taking my username and password. It asks for an email address, so I tried using the email address associated with my Sirius account, which doesn't make sense, but I tried it anyway. Still no go. Am I missing something here? Any insight?

[edadks]

There's a note on their support page saying that the web player is only supporting xm accounts. I'm pretty sure that I was also using this with my sirius online account before the latest problem, but it probably got caught in the changeover.