Shifting From P2P To Stream Ripping

An anonymous reader submits "As users continue to try fending off the ever more litigious music industry, some seem to have dropped P2P entirely, moving to ripping instead. While they lose some control over what they are downloading, it's a untraceable way to download music (no way for the RIAA to track users or sue). With some of the more powerful software that's been coming out recently, stream ripping has become more main-stream. Some of the more well known software packages, like StationRipper, allow users to download several thousand songs on a daily basis. And, depending on how you read the law, it's 100% legal. How will the RIAA respond? As more users move to this type of technology to avoid the P2P lawsuits, how will the music industry respond?"

Comments

Good idea but...

[sH4RD]

I have tried playing with a couple stream rippers before, only problem is streams tend to be real low quality...

Re:Good idea but...

[revmoo]

I have tried playing with a couple stream rippers before, only problem is streams tend to be real low quality...

Ever considered streaming from high-quality stations then?

Re:Good idea but...

[pla]

Ever considered streaming from high-quality stations then?

Feel free to name a few - Either >256k/s, or >160k/s VBR (I don't know of any VBR streams, since streaming inherently tends to require CBR content)...

Although, I've asked before, and I'll probably ask again - Why not just rip from CDs borrowed from friends (or the library)? Equally untraceable (if not more so, since although they can't tell what you do with the stream, I'd imagine it must look exceedingly strange to see someone listening to half-a-dozen stations at a time, 24/7), and you get to have 100% control over the resulting rip. Best of all possible worlds - You get the songs, you get as high of a quality as you want, you get whatever format you prefer, and not even the person you borrow the CD from needs to know what you've done (although at least for friends, most really don't care, beyond asking for some reciprocation).

Like many /.'ers, I enjoy the use of the internet for almost all my informational needs; but sometimes, SneakerNet still offers advantages you just can't get anywhere online.

My parents used to do this

[eaglebtc]

They would put a tape recorder up to the radio and capture the latest songs, then make copies for their friends. Sure it sounded bad but they didn't care. And neither did the RIAA, because their albums sounded better than the crappy copies the kids made, so they figured they would still want to go out and buy the latest album because of the high fidelity sound. Now that we can get digital copies they are sorely afraid. THe next move will be toward an encrypted stream, but as I always say...if you can hear it, you can rip it.

Re:My parents used to do this

[LostCluster]

Not to mention, recording the analog out of a DirecTV box or another sound card sounds pretty clean as long as you've got good wires...

Analog copies aren't as lossy as they used to be, especially when you're recording a source that did most of its travelling digitally until the last moment.

How would the RIAA respond?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, bribe^h^h^h^h^hLobby Congress to make it illegal, of course.

Expect "internet radio" to disappear

[Zork the Almighty]

If a respectable number of P2P users switch to this, internet radio itself will be attacked. It has already been attacked, actually, but P2P was a bigger boogeyman.

home taping

[potpie]

In the 80's, it was believed (by large record companies mainly) that home taping of radio broadcasts was killing music. This is the exact same thing as home taping, and home taping is perfectly legal (is that time shifting or space shifting or something)! So really, there is no legal or moral reason not to do it, and the RIAA can't very well (unless I have too much faith in human reason- I hope not) sue people for taping the same broadcasts they get from the radio if they get it from the internet. That just seems far too arbritrary a lawsuit to happen... but the thought still scares me for some reason.

Re:home taping

[BCW2]

Go back to the early 70's, the death of the music industry was going to be the - cassette tape. Actually heard the exact samr quotes from industry execs back then as the ones they used against Napster. I mean word for word, like the quality of their product, the good speach writers are from the past.

The funny thing was that no matter how good a system you had, a home recording never beat store bought.

re: depending on how you read the law...

[lsdino]

And, depending on how you read the law, it's 100% legal.

This is exactly what was said about Napster, look at how long that lasted. I think its a bit of a pipe dream to believe that there will be a legal way to acquire large amounts of copyrighted music for free w/o the consent of the copyright holder.

And on the off chance it was legal to do this you can be sure that Congress would put a stop to it pretty fast.

Broadcasters: Turn off crossfading

[Sarojin]

It's really annoying when you get bits of the surrounding songs on your saved music. Turning off crossfading will facilitate smooth ripping. Thank you.

I was doing this for a while. I streamed in about 15 niche stations that played the kind of music I liked, and got a lot of music. The error rate was fairly high, and I ended up with a lot of duplicates, but I found a lot of good music, and filled in some gaps in my collection.

Using a new legit tech for piracy only hurts it.

[zapp]

You know why the RIAA is going after P2P? Because its used mostly for piracy. Sure, some legit. songs are being downloaded, but the majority of it is blatant piracy.

Now here we are saying Internet radio is good, legitimate fair use; and then we use it for piracy.

Just like how Apple tried to be relaxed with their AAC DRM, but people just had to crack it. Sure, ther e are valid reasons for this, but once again people will use a valid, legal technology for piracy and ruin it for the rest of us.

Tired old formula

[iustus]

I remember when they shut Napster down. Napster was great, and efficient, but since napster had a centralized server it was easy to target and take down.

Everyone imediatly when to Gnutella-net. Since Gnutella net was not centralized it could not be shut down. But the problem was, not being centralized meant that propagating search querries was ridiculously expensive in bandwidth, thus it was a slight pain in the ass.

Then we were worried that they would start sueing individuals, so someone developed free net that would use everyone else as a proxy to hide the origionating IP, thus the IP you see is not that of the person downloading the file. This would have worked but was damn stupid as far as wasting bandwith for anonymity.

the RIAA held off while on individual lawsuits, freenet never took off, now that the lawsuits are becoming a problem again we come up with stupid solution 'B', this streaming data client.

Basically, our file sharing clients will get worse and worse, and it will boil down to asking ourselves "do I really want to get this song in a shoddy quality, with skips and pops/waste a half hour in failed attempts to get it, or is it easier to just buy the song online legally?

And in fact, this is the way it should work. There will always be free clients and you will always be able to pirate music, it just a question how much of a pain in the ass it will be, and whether or not you value your time and quality of music over your money.

If the RIAA was smart(they aren't), they would lower the price of song downloads to 20 cents (an artist usually makes 10 cents per song on each cd), no one would bother wading through all the fake songs on Kazaa and most people would flock to the pay sites.

$1-$2 a songs? ppppttttt. . . Pirating methods don't suck that much . . yet.

Suddenly I lost all sympathy for him

[Daemonic]

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.

So it's not just a case of taping stuff off the radio for yourself - there's morons doing the online equivalent of setting up a stall on the high street selling mix-tapes made off the radio.

This is where the problems lie. Stop trying to go public with services/sharing/selling. You are stealing from somebody.

Kids copy a few tracks off the radio, or from their friend's CD, and no-one cares that much. It's what we've had for decades, and we can all live quite happilly thank-you.

As soon as someone starts distributing en masse to the world at large - to people they don't really know - the balance tips.

We have a balance between how much hassle/loss of quality we'll endure for free music. The record industry has a balance between how much hassle it is to track/sue people against how well organised they are, and how widely they're distributing their stuff.