Music only cable channel audio capture?

One of those music only channels on my cable system is playing a wonderful eclectic mix of spooky tunes, (there's stuff I haven't heard before) and I'd like to save some of it, (for private personal use only of course) if only to survive the onslaught of Christmas music they'll replace it with on Nov. 1st.

I could record via the earphone jack output, but there must be a more elegant way?

And no, I don't have a DVR.

Life was more simple back when you could just pop a cassette in and record your fave radio station.

My cable box has a toslink output so if you have the same then maybe that would be the way to go as long as your pc has a toslink input.

Music Choice I'm guessing? They always seem to pull out some interesting stuff on the specialized channels. Indeed if your cable box has optical out, you get a much better signal despite being DD 2.0 192 kbp/s. The difference is staggering over the normal RCA.

Also, they have streaming on their website once logged in with cable info. I'm not for sure if it is the exact same thing as what the channel is currently playing but I think it would be as you can select from every channel available on cable.

No cable box alas. I just get basic cable which the HD sets in the house decode just fine. They gave everybody in the neighborhood some really cheapo converter boxes a few years back that don't even downconvert the HD channels. I might have to dig one out of storage and see what the specs are again.

I think it's Music Choice, but their site doesn't acknowledge my cheap ass cable provider. ;)

I've seen these little gizmos that take a toslink signal and convert it to two channel analog output on Ebay. Frys seems to have similar devices in store.

My plan was to route the signal into my DVD recorder. No toslink in on the laptop. Pity I can't just plug the toslink out from the tv into my CD recorder!

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.

No metadata. Before a couple other channels got scrambled there were still images, giving the song title and related trivia.

I hadn't even thought using one of those gadgets, thanks for the info!

Well, I finally exhumed one of the cheapo converter boxes I mentioned before. They have good old fashioned RCA audio/video jacks on the back. Took a while to hook up and let the contraption update itself. Having 80's cable box flashbacks here.

Scanning through all the channels, I couldn't find that darn music channel. Then, I notice a button on the tiny remote with a musical note. Pressed it, and voila! All the music channels, well, just that one they don't scramble and charge extra for.

So I'm going to record straight into my old DVD recorder. Video quality is irrelevant to this, so I'm experimenting with the longer recording modes I've never used. Audio doesn't drop below 256 kps on any of those, which is more than enough for this.

Pretty sure the party is over at midnight, so I'm going to grab all I can grab! ;)