STREAMRIP YOUR iPOD

It’s a great scam, if you think about it. You bought, say, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John when it came out in 1973 (am I dating myself here?), and you still like it.

You even still have the album, although the record player is long gone, and they don’t make them anymore. You liked the album so much, you bought a cassette tape version to play in the car, and later on, a CD.

Now you’ve got an iPod or similar MP3 player, and you considering buying the MP3 version.

Hmm. Shelling out four times for the same product? If the item in question was an electric shaver, you’d probably stop after the second and move on to another brand – or demand that the company replace the defective machine for free.

You certainly wouldn’t pay four times for a machine that worked perfectly well, just
because they changed the packaging or logo.

Yet you’re willing to pay over and over for music just because it is being produced on a different medium.

Of course there are quality issues – you might find the LP is scratched (even if you could figure out a way to play it).

However, when you find it necessary to re-buy a product you already own – several times – it’s not unreasonable to at least consider the possibility that ‘something’ is going on.

For decades, LPs and 45rpm records wee the standard for playing music at home. But records didn’t travel well, and couldn’t be played in cars. As young people in the 1960s and 1970s started buying cars in droves, they demanded music ‘on the go’.

Cassette tapes came into their own, quickly surpassing vinyl and the preferred medium. The auto and recording industry had been pushing 8-racks, but these too were eclipsed by cassettes, because they could not only be played – they could record as well.

In the 1970s, stereo systems achieved excellent sound, and cassettes provided perfectly good listening. Why, then, were manufacturers, chiefly Sony and Philips, so intent on coming out with digital formats on CD?

They will tell you something like ‘the quality is much better’. But we all know the real reason – to get you to buy music in a format that was (at the time) non-reproducible by consumers.

In my opinion, the vast majority of people can’t tell whether they are listening to a cassette or a CD on a good sound system (if they have their eyes closed). The only reason, I think, for this push to CDs was to get users to buy their favorite music a second or even third time.

Now they’re doing it again. Shouldn’t you be able to copy your digital recordings – the ones you paid good money for – for your own or your friends’ benefit?

However many CDs now come with ‘copy protection’, and while it is generally considered legal in most places to make a backup – most software manufacturers explicitly authorize the user to do so – the new protection systems mean you won’t be able to convert that CD into an MP3 file for your iPod.

What’s your recourse? Why, head over to the Apple store, plop down some money, and download the same music, paying for it yet again.

There are two ways you can get the music you want into MP3 format – one using the cassette tapes you already own. The other involves completely legal downloads of popular commercial music, not running afoul ( so far ) of laws involving copying and downloading.

As you probably know, there are thousands of web sites that ‘stream’ music in digital format, such as those using Shoutcast.

The mechanics of doing this are rather simple. Just hook a record or tape player to a computer and ‘rip’ the music into digital format. If the music is on CD it’s already in digital format. When you ‘tune into’ an Internet station, you are downloading the music to be played through your computer’s speakers.

If you can download it for playback, why not download it for delayed playback – by recording it?

The rules and issues here are murky. They are also murky with other digital copying standards.

It is apparently legal for radio stations to stream copyrighted works over the Internet.

Radio stations have to pay royalties to groups like ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers). In recent years, ASCAP and others have developed a flat fee for web broadcasters of several hundred dollars per year, depending on the station’s ‘listenership’.

With the fee paid, recording the stream becomes from the listener’s point of view equivalent to recording a song off the radio.

To take advantage of this situation, there are any number of programs that let you record streams in MP3 format – individual songs, and even the correct title and artist.

If you use a program like StreamRipper:

Or StationRipper:

You can quickly build a collection of thousands of songs. StationRipper can record up to 600 Shoutcast streams at a time.

And what about those old tapes and records?

There is an easy and cheap way to get those onto our computer. More, much more on building your MP3 collection another time.

Dennis Turner