This post is meant to arm you with the ability to listen online to police scanners nationwide, and record them if you want to. I came across this information when looking up info on the G20 summit and associated protests, and thought I would pass it on. As a tea party protester the police haven’t yet been the problem, but this could change anytime and as we all know, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I also thought it was kinda cool to be able to listen online to the police go about their day-to-day activities almost anywhere in the country without the need of a police scanner.
First, you need to go to http://www.radioreference.com. From there, put your mouse over the button that says “Live Audio”. Move the mouse down to the “Live Scanners” link and click it. You will be taken to a page that has a map of the United States. After clicking the state that interests you, select the appropriate county or scroll down to see all scanners available in the state. After you select a county, a selection of scanners in that county will be shown. You may click on the speaker in the left hand column if you just want to listen, but if you want to record you will need to do a little more. The easiest way to record these broadcasts is to download the Freecorder toolbar. This is a modified Ask.com toolbar that works with Internet Explorer, and records anything (that I’ve come across) that is played in the browser window. You will need to change the “Player Selection” window on RadioReference’s page to “Web Player” to get the live scanner to play in the browser window instead of your media player. A small window will pop up that the toolbar won’t record, but if you copy and paste the address from the player window into your browser you can record what you are hearing. Some folks don’t like adding toolbars to their browsers, myself included, but I usually use Firefox for browsing anyway, so adding a toolbar to a browser I’ll only use for this purpose was no big deal. The Freecorder toolbar has options that allow you to convert the audio you capture into many different formats and allows the recording of video as well. It’s just that easy. And it’s free. I tried to figure out how to record audio from Winamp and Windows Media Player and for whatever reason it wasn’t working, probably pilot error, so I went with this method. Have fun!
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