We
often get requests for applications that can record streamed audio to your hard
drive, from Internet radio stations such as Shoutcast, in our Music
Download, Peer to Peer (P2P) & Legal Issues forum.
Here is an open source program called Streamripper that
can do just that: "Streamripper records shoutcast-compatible streams. For
shoutcast style streams it finds the "meta data" or track separation data, and
uses that as a marker for where the track should be separated."
While there are
plenty of applications that allow the user to find MP3 tracks for download, such
as Napster, LimeWire, Morpheus etc., you still have to know what song you wish
to find. The advantage of stream ripping, is you can probably find a station
that only plays a certain genre such as Jazz or certain decades. Then, you can
let the application record the streams, you listen later and maybe you
"discover" new music you like! Plus, you don't have to worry about the RIAA
spoiling your day, as this is not an illegal practice as of yet. At least in the
United States.
This software is supported on about any
operating system you can imagine and also comes as a Winamp 2/5 plug-in. This
latest release, 1.61.24 is for Winamp.
You can find a tutorial on this page for describing the use of Streamripper as
a Winamp plug-in. If you would like to try the latest version, you can find
version 1.61.24 on this page at SourceForge.
Source: SourceForge
