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Daddy, where do MP3s come from?
By Gearhead, NetworkWorld.com, 03/23/05
"About 36 million Americans—or 27% of internet users—say they download either music or video files and about half of them have found ways outside of traditional peer-to-peer networks or paid online services to swap their files, according to the most recent survey of the Pew Internet & American Life Project." So begins the latest report titled "Music and Video Downloading Moves Beyond P2P" from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The idea that this is news is remarkable in itself. Despite all the furor surrounding P2P and file sharing sites the fact is that people share music by low tech methods such as borrowing a friend's CD and ripping it onto their PC.
Here's another way to build a music collection that is easier than P2P and its fast: Just use StationRipper or StreamRipper ...
These programs allow you to build a music library by simply tuning into Internet radio stations and saving their streams to disk. In fact, i-radio stations with broadcasts that include stream metadata make it really easy because these tools will save each track that can be identified into separate files!
The latest release of StationRipper (version 2.13) is really impressive. It allows you to record Shoutcast Audio and Video streams as well as Podcasts, records up to 600 streams at a time, you can buy the music you are ripping (nod to da man there), it integrates with iTunes and auto-generates iTunes playlists of songs recorded, doesn't duplicate already recorded songs, keeps a list of the music and stations you've recorded, you can listen to any station being recorded with a single mouse click, it can ignore songs under a preset size (allowing trailers and station idents to be skipped), and auto-record whatever was being recorded the last time you ran StationRipper. All that for $14.99.
StreamRipper is both a standalone stream capture program and an add-on for Winamp and its free. The latest release (version 1.61.1 for Windows) has a much improved ability to separate songs (read this) along with regular expression support under UNIX making it possible to parse the stream metadata so you can control what data goes into which MP3 file header fields.
According to the StreamRipper's creator, Jon Clegg, the software "is now part of the FreeBSD standard distribution, mentioned in the Linux MP3 HOWTO, known to compile on many platforms such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, BeOS [1], and OS/2."
Clegg goes on: "With the emergence of file sharing protocols such as Napster, Gnutella, and now Mojonation and Freenet, the average Internet user can download nearly any mp3 he wants in a matter of no time, but many times people don't know what they want. StreamRipper allows you to download an entire station of music. Many of these mp3 radio stations only play certain genres, so you can now download an entire collection of goa/trance music, an entire collection of jazz, punk rock, whatever you want."
Anyone who thinks that the MP3 genie can ever be put back in the bottle is either high or works for the RIAA.
Notes:
[1] See also the Haiku Project and yellowTAB's Zeta.
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