Ripping from the radio
p2pnet.net News:- The entertainment industry is re-doubling its efforts to force digital radio listeners to listen to what the labels want, and pay for the privilege, too.
Dream on, Cary and Mitch.
And with that in mind, there’s an interesting new radio app that’ll get you a list of available Shoutcast stations you can record, “creating a single MP3 file for each song the station plays”.
It’ll also allow you to record up to 300 streams at one time while its ‘Memory Recording’ tracks the songs you download, copying the final song file to your music library. If that song gets re-recorded in the future, it’ll skip it so if you end up deleting it, it won’t record, “bloating your collection with music you don’t want”.
You can schedule it to allow and disallow recordings for off hours, not to speak of telling it to re-launch rips of up to 100 of the last stations you’ve recorded with a single mouse click.
It’s Greg Ratajik’s StationRipper.
Ratajik has been writing software since 1993 and you’ll find a list of some of his creations – games, utilities, server stuff, and so on – here. “Most of the things I’ve written over the years I wanted or needed for myself, but weren’t really available,” he told p2pnet.
And when it came to digital radio, he’d been using StreamRipper32, but, “I just wasn’t very happy with it. It was a pain to find stations to listen to, you couldn’t rip more than one without a new copy of the app running, etc.
“So, I decided to write my own, which is how I ended up with StationRipper. I also worked on a P2P app a couple of years ago that was never released, but with the insane lawsuits flying around against those kind of apps, decided to stop working on it.”
Ratajik says there are now a lot of mirrors out there, making it difficult for him to give an accurate tally of downloads, but he’s guessing there have been more than 350,000 so far.
“The site will be getting around 1.5 million page views this month – which is starting to become a bit of a bandwidth issue, LOL.”
Right now StationRipper is zeroed to Shoutcast stations and although Ratajik woud like to open it up, “I’m not sure if I’ll ever get time to do it,” he says. “I use the StreamRipper libs to do the actual rip. If I can get my hands on something like that for other stream types, I’d just integrate it in. If I’ve got to write it from scratch, then I don’t see it happening any time soon.
“If any open source developers out there want to do it, drop me a line 
”
He says he hasn’t heard from Big Music in the shape of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and hopes he never does.
“StationRipper is, I believe, an application that has lots of non-infringing uses,” he told us.
“I’ve always been a big believer in going after the people actually breaking the laws, not software developers that write software that MIGHT be misused – so let the people alone that are just recording for their personal use, and go after those sharing with others. One interpretation of Fair Use would seem to indicate sharing with ‘friends’ is ok. But that’s another argument).
“I always thought going after Napster was kinda like suing the phone company for releasing the yellow pages – I have no doubt there’s a lot of things in those listings that might be shady or breaking the law, but it’d be crazy to hold the phone book company responsible.”
Ratajik says he’s trying to sell music from StationRipper via Amazon): “if users click the ‘Buy’ button they can buy the music being ripped.
“As a lot of the rips aren’t really perfect – cut odd, cross fades, DJ’s talking, etc – I personally find I’ve been buying the music I like a lot, just to get a clean copy. The problem with that now is Amazon doesn’t do single songs, usually. If iTunes ever gets an associates program going, I think that will be an easier sell to users.
“The type and amount of music I listen to has grown an amazing amount the last few years – there’s stuff I listen to no that I wouldn’t have ever even know about without Shoutcast music (and mp3.com when it was still around). I can’t imagine a world where we just get music via CD’s, any more.”
As for the webcasting community, some like iStationRipper, thinking it’s a good way for people to listen to their station and, “Some hate it and want it to go away.”
Most, however, seem ambivalent, he says, going on:
“I’ve tried finding a middle ground several times, but can’t seem to get anyone to talk about it without yelling. I’d like to get a repository of info together that indicates what a streams rules are for ripping. Like, max songs/megs per day, hours that people can rip, don’t allow ripping, etc. I actually started working on a web service to do that – that StationRipper would hook into to – but couldn’t get any broadcasters to actually talk about it.
“They just kinda screamed and were generally upset.
“I personally started using rippers, and still do use rippers, because listening to a stream can be a pain, with disconnects, lag, etc. Once the song has been ripped, you can actually listen to it without any of those problems. And all the ad’s and station ID’s are also ripped, so I usually end up listening to the entire program as it was originally broadcast.”
Stay tuned …
April 21st, 2004 at 11:08 pm
Huh. Got this thing a couple of hours ago. Went out, came back, gotten a BUNCH of MP3’s (and they all sound good). Kinda cool! Also neat that you just got gobs of music, don’t have to figure out WHAT you want, you know?
April 21st, 2004 at 11:53 pm
Quote: “StationRipper is, I believe, an application that has lots of non-infringing uses,” he told us.
I agree with his opinion, but I don’t think the RIAA would. The same thing has been used in defence of P2P apps. That has not stopped the content “owner” brownshirts from pushing their “legal” thug tactics on P2P developers.
I hope he’s right (and I’m wrong).
Way cool sounding app tho. I gotta try it.
April 22nd, 2004 at 1:25 am
Wow this thing is awesome! I never know what song to download! This is all taken care of for me because all i have to do is find some decent shoutcast stations and bigity-bam I get great music like that!
April 22nd, 2004 at 5:25 am
If you’re referring to Mussolini’s Combat Squads, then you meant to say Blackshirts
.
April 22nd, 2004 at 2:05 pm
What I’m envisaging is a gadget with a HDD and a USB connector. You plug it into a PC and it pretends to be a USB audio adaptor, something like a SoundBlaster Extigy perhaps. The PC sends PCM audio to it over the USB connection, fully expecting it to be converted to analogue, amplified and listened to. Instead, the gadget is simply writing the raw PCM data to its own hard disk. Maybe it could add WAV headers, maybe it could recompress on-the-fly into MP3 or Ogg Vorbis and write to a flash card instead of a HDD, but those are just details: the main thing is that it’s snarfing data that is being broadcast down a bus.
The fun part is that it also pretends to be — well, it is — a USB mass storage device. So now you just mount it and read back the raw PCM files.
Alternatively, if you already have the necessary software for playing audio from a stream anyway, why can’t you just hack the source code a little so that it outputs data to a regular file as well as or instead of the DSP device?
By the way: the only file sharing application I have ever used is Apache. It’s great when you get it set up properly.
April 22nd, 2004 at 3:10 pm
Seems we see gloom of shoutcasting… BTW what about linux port?
April 22nd, 2004 at 3:27 pm
Good point. I think the brownshirts reference is to the overnight policy-and-uniform change in the Nazi party. On that day, Hitler himself showed up wearing the garb.
Either way, it’s ridiculous that they take 94% of the money because they have had the means of pressing the discs and distributing them, etc. Now distribution costs are essentially $0, and they want to raise prices from $0.99/song. If you lower the price, you’ll sell more. If you raise them, you’ll sell less.
They haven’t realized that the biscuit wheels fell off the gravy train long ago.
BTW, the app KICKS ASS ! ! ! ! !
April 22nd, 2004 at 4:17 pm
What I don’t get is that it never used to be a problem to record FM radio songs on tape or Mini Disc… What is the big difference in recording em on a computer? Is it going to be illegal to record TV shows on your computer but encouraged to buy a “plug in the TV” DVD recorder?
The RIAA and others don’t understand that kids (and others) can’t buy ll the CDs, DVDs, Video Games as well as all the latest technology needed to play these… I mean, if you look at the numbers, maybe audio CD sales have dropped a bit, but DVD and video games sales have gone way up… So it really seems to me it is very lame to only blame the internet.
If they go after the producers of Kazaa and such, Why don’t they sue apple, microsoft, HP and others for making accessible to the public computer technology which is nothing else but a “digitaliser”, one of the greatest recording machine ever?
April 22nd, 2004 at 4:34 pm
Right on. In the whole supply chain which culminates in a punter buying a CD, there is only *ONE* job that can’t be done by anyone else; and that is singing the song in the first place. Every other job is transferrable.
It’s time to introduce mandatory non-exclusive, non-discriminatory licencing — in other words, allow ANYONE to send a sum of money directly to the artist, and in return, receive the right to make a permanent copy a piece of music.
April 22nd, 2004 at 10:26 pm
It never used to be a problem because the quality of the recordings were much worse. I’m old enough (shhhhhh) to remember the crackle hiss and pop of a cassette tape. Matter of fact, I still have some of them somewhere. Only time you came near to the quality you have on CD was if you went and spent $10 for a TDK high quality tape…you know those funky metal ones you could use to fend off a mugger if you had to. But i digress, the RIAA, et all, are upset that we can now copy and get the same quality as what we started out with.
The RIAA know that kids cant afford to buy the latest of everything, and they dont care. That means nothing to them. If you dont have the money, then the RIAA could care less about you. Unless of course you are “stealing” then they get their undies all in a twist.
I just came across this software but a buddy of mine and i were discussing just this sort of thing. If i were a better programmer i might’ve tried to do the same thing. Glad I didn’t. I like to listen to things that i cant pick up on my second job. with this i can record programs and put them on my MP3 player and take to work. I can also, get to hear music the local stations dont really play (my old ass likes techno, etc).
Well anyway, thats my 34 cents.
K
August 9th, 2004 at 12:01 am
any idea of rippers that support vorbis ogg? radio ripper doesnt.
November 21st, 2004 at 9:44 pm
RIAA would fight that harder than they fight ’sharing’. heh! kick em in the slats, then lose a boot up where the sun don’t shine
October 14th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
“The RIAA know that kids cant afford to buy the latest of everything, and they dont care. That means nothing to them. If you dont have the money, then the RIAA could care less about you. Unless of course you are âstealingâ then they get their undies all in a twist.”
Yeah I agree it all about money and forget everything else!
http://www.ethosfrnetwork.com