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Stream-ripping Is 'Fastest Growing' Music Piracy (bbc.com)
Stream-ripping is now the fastest-growing form of music piracy in the UK, new research has suggested. From a report: Several sites and apps allow users to turn Spotify songs, YouTube videos and other streaming content into permanent files to store on phones and computers. Record labels claim that "tens, or even hundreds of millions of tracks are illegally copied and distributed by stream-ripping services each month." One service alone is thought to have more than 60 million monthly users. According to research by the Intellectual Property Office and PRS For Music, 15 percent of adults in the UK regularly use these services, with 33 percent of them coming from the 16-24 age bracket. Overall usage of stream-ripping sites increased by 141.3 percent between 2014 and 2016, overshadowing all other illegal music services.
do people just not care (or even know about) sound fidelity anymore...?
if you checked out the quality of the average ear-buds that people use with their phones, you would have the answer to that question.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Technically, it's not "piracy" even in the idiotic sense in those jurisdictions where recording is allowed.
Ezekiel 23:20
Several sites and apps allow users to turn Spotify songs, YouTube videos and other streaming content into permanent files to store on phones and computers.
You mean "time shifting". This has been litigated already.
Overall usage of stream-ripping sites increased by 141.3 percent between 2014 and 2016, overshadowing all other illegal music services.
Except that this isn't actually illegal. So now I wonder how many other apps services are incorrectly called "illegal" by this group.
Nope, no sig
People don't care about anything but 'FREE'. So who cares about paying for the product any longer.
Then their favorite artist stops touring and producing music and they complain because "They were my favorite band".
I don't pirate music- but I don't exactly think the music artists of large bands are really struggling for money. They tour because THAT's where they make most of their money.
Smaller bands probably aren't going to be on most streaming sites anyway.
In reality, stream ripping isn't really much different to copying to cassette from the radio like everyone was doing in the 80's.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If you think the earbuds are bad, some of the crap over-produced loudness wars inspired music they put through those headphones couldn't sound good even if gold-plated monster cables actually worked. Hell, Wikipedia even has a nice image of how more recent releases of old songs suffer the same problem: Waveforms for 3 releases of Black or White by Michael Jackson
Look at classic rock songs before that era to get a good idea how much its changed and how much it affects music. Here's Stairway to Heaven which I'm sure most people are familiar with. That song would be practically impossible today since whatever dick weevil would be put in charge of mastering the album would have maxed it out immediately, removing any ability for the song to build-up musically as well as lyrically.
Any song being crafted for mainstream radio play just isn't going to be as good of a listen (I'm not even talking about whether the song is good lyrically or musically) because the shit stain producers utterly rob it of expressivity in order to make it stand out more amidst all the other noise. There needs to be something like a Director's Cut for albums that give us something other than the radio mix.
Depends.
I'm an old person. But back when I was a teenager, I used to record stuff off the radio to listen to--the AM Radio. Why? Because it's free. Yeah, the quality sucked. Yeah, I sometimes ended up with some DJ talking up the song. But I was willing to forgo all that because it was free.
I assume it's a similar thing here.
Songs with high dynamic range are annoying to listen to in a lot of everyday situations, such as in a car or while working out at the gym, as volume has to constantly be adjusted. Not everyone listens to music in an underground bunker with perfect noise isolation, $10000 speakers, etc. Also, I doubt anyone here can truly differentiate between a lossless audio file and a reasonable MP3/AAC, most of you are just full of yourselves (many blind AB tests out there that people tend to ignore due to bias). Most people really just care about the music; sound quality is secondary. Heck, people can't even differentiate between a modern violin and a Stradivarius, let alone the difference between MP3/lossless.
In reality, stream ripping isn't really much different to copying to cassette from the radio like everyone was doing in the 80's.
I think that the technology/customer/industry will figure all this out eventually, but this statement is way, way wrong.
In the 80s you had to listen to the radio (and its ads) to catch the song. You had to record it on physical media. To re-distribute, you had to purchase additional physical media, duplicate the content in real time, one-at-a-time for the average person, and then deliver those physical copies, either in person or by paying for mail.
There are significant constraints to this process that have been completely wiped out by the modern version. Songs are on-demand and distribution at practically unlimited volumes is practically free.
I can only speak for YouTube as I don't use Spotify,
Spotify do the compression themselves from original audio (so there aren't many copy-generational problems).
Spotify uses Vorbis (better quality than MP3 at same bitrate according to A/B test. Definitely better than WMA), because back when they started, that was the best license-free codec guaranteed to be available in the largest set of browsers (it was an IETF standard), and a permissive free library (easy to embed into apps).
(This was back before OPUS, the current IETF standard came and basically killed nearly every other codec performance wise - with the sole exception of some extremely low-bandwidth usage that are not found on internet)
Spotify uses bitrates of
- 96kbps for its low quality setting (around the same quality as MP3 @~128kbps. So clearly audible, but still largely acceptable quality)
- 160kbps for its normal quality settings (very good quality for vorbis, hard to tell appart in most typical settings)
-. ~320 for the high quality settings for paying customer for local saves (should sound lossless nearly everywhere).
Spotify has mentionned thinking of adding lossless codecs for local saves (I think it was FLAC ? I'm not sure. But it was recently mentionned on /.)
I think they have considered OPUS now that its a IETF standar (like nearly every one else online is doing) (and even the industry is doing informally/experimentally with Digital Radio Mondial).
If you rip the high quality streams from Spotify it means that you have access to an extremely good quality stream (but it also means that you're a paying customer, at which point ripping doesn't make that much sense, as opposed to simply locally saving on the smartphone's SD card with the app and having your music offline everywhere you want it)
At least that's for DRM-busting the cache/local saves and for high quality setting.
Regular settings are of lower (but still very good) quality.
S/PDIF loop is going to add copy-generationnal loss of whatever you use to re-encode the raw S/PDIF stream (unless you go lossless, e.g.: FLAC).
Analog loop is in practice going to add even more artefacts specially with poor analog connections in an electrically noisy environment (cue in jokes about Apple's shitty audio jacks)
but YouTube vides have MPA audio at 128 kbps at the lower resolutions and 192 kbps at 720p and up. It's arguable, but 128 kbps should be roughly equivalent to 192 kbps MP3. So it's not as bad as you think.
the quality of AAC is *extremely* dependent on the quality of the encoder. See FFMPEG's older codec. (though in this case, it's google. so I would assume that their codec doesn't suck too much).
That's just one of the available codecs on youtube. Youtube will actually generate lots of different formats for each video (that also include completely different codecs), so there is much variability depending on which alternative format one descides to use. e.g. they also provide OPUS @160kbps which is the same kind of "hard to tell appart in A/B/X test" as AAC@192kbps.
But the main problem is in the process itself :
Youtube *generates* lots of different formats, from whatever the user has uploaded.
In theory, it's possible to upload an MKV using h264 lossless for video and FLAC for audio (been doing that).
But in practice, people will upload whatever the "export" button of their video editor does.
Which is very often MP4 file with AAC for the audio.
So you have copy-generationnal artifacts due to recoding from one lossy format into another.
Also add to the factor that the AAC codec of the video editor might be crappy.
(This is part of the reasons why official youtube recommendations for MP4 and AAC audio are 384 kbps - just to be sure that even crappy codecs manage to make a high enough quality compression).
So that 192 kbps AAC audio you get on
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