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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.
I would guess this wouldn't sound very good even on a portable player or in a car, much less even a modestly decent home sound system....
Or, do people just not care (or even know about) sound fidelity anymore...?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
How many PCs are equipped with a Dell cup holder?
I bought an app last night in Microsoft's Windows App Store to rip content from YouTube. It isn't underground and you don't need to even use dubious apps or warez anymore to rip.
This is worse quality than recording off the radio and they still survived, plus their stats are bullshit, unless you know of ANY stream ripping sites that publish their visitor stats and demographics publicly ?
the biz is just pissed that Joe schmoe in his bedroom with a copy of Ableton gets to the front of itunes/spotify on musical merit whereas they have to buy their shite leftover acts into the charts via the Philippines/Malaysia click farms or Simon Cowell
Recording radio stations to cassette tape. I don't recall the media companies expressing outrage back then but perhaps they did.
Is this ripping and the demographics mentioned, any different than when the Sony Walkman (or whatever the first 4-track tape recording radio available was) came on the scene and recording/mixtapes became ubiquitous?
If that is considered music piracy, I remember dozens to hundreds of people when I was a kid being involved in it in the form of sharing mixtapes of whatever music was available, even though I was too young to own a portable music player of my own (it was portable cd players by the time I had one and while ripping was possible, not many people did it because of the recordable cd expense, as well as the limited capacity of redbook audio CDs compared to their size.)
In a world where some n1gger called Kendrick Lamar (most people will say "who the fuck is that?" at this point) can make $20 million dollars for pretending he is a musician, I have no fucking sympathy.
It's the same thing we did in the 80's with tape recording music from the radio. Guess what, industry... YOU CAN'T CONTROL EVERYTHING.
I stumbled across this website a couple of years ago and I'll occasionally use it to rip the audio from YouTube. I primarily download audio that I can't find other places, like live songs or rare performances. As a reformed Pirate Bay avid user, I now very rarely download any audio now that I don't pay for.
As for quality, I typically find that it's adequate for general use.... working out, playing through motorcycle speakers, etc. A true audiophile won't like the quality, but most of us can't tell the difference.
People are stupid.
Here some folks like Spotify, Deezer etx give you what you want. Latest music, (streaming as anyone wants) to a really fair price. Actually maybe too low. And still people gonna download it instead.
Come on!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C2%B730_C%C2%B760_C%C2%B790_Go
http://www.trustedreviews.com/Asus-Xonar-D2-Sound-Card-review-asus-xonar-d2-sound-card-page-2
ASUS call ALT DRM backup, which lets you record what you are hearing, circumnavigating DRM restrictions."
Back in the day there was this thing we called "radio" that sometimes streamed music, and we used mechanical apps to store that music on a physical medium. We could "download" streamed video too, with more sophisticated mechanical apps of the "VCR" category.
Technically, it's not "piracy" even in the idiotic sense in those jurisdictions where recording is allowed.
Ezekiel 23:20
Avast flags the site as hosting malware. I practice safe hex and avoid digital whorehouses, but just out of curiosity, is there any verification?
This is no different than recording a broadcast off of the TV or radio and they are still in business.
Stream ripping has been going on since Shoutcast days with programs like Odd Sock Streamripper https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Nothing new...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
youtube-dl FTW. Hint: it handles more than youtube, and has one cajillion command line options to suit you necessities.
My cellphone ringtone is a ring tone.
So in other words they're copying the broadcasts on-the-fly. Like good 'ol VHS tapes of TV shows.
Therefore the quality must be stellar, and the sales & distribution must be ruining the streaming stations' bank accounts.
Companies can not WAIT for us to stop paying-to-own and instead continuously pay-to-rent :'
A service that requires you to download audio to use it would allow you to download audio?
I'm a developer for a high end streaming box. All you would need to rip content from one of the lossless streaming services supported by our box is the root password. (Yes it is terrible that we have root password access enabled)
Gangsta! In! Disquise!
Live! By! The! Stream! Die! By! The! Stream!
Cabin! Fever! FIVE!
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
...Are the same people that are worried about going over their data limits on their mobile devices.
Remind me again how this is different from the days of cassette tapes and VHS. People have been recording songs off the radio for years. And the same with recording videos off the tube with VHS tapes. Either way, we're still recording songs and video for FREE to watch as often as we like.
Before the licensing rules changed and drove most legitimate streaming radio offline because they were little one or two person operations done for fun I was using streamripper software all the time to record the catalogs of different streaming stations that I enjoyed so I could listen to them when I was out and about. Everything old is new again I guess, except apparently you need to use hosted 3rd part stuff rather than run your own app to do so. I'd much rather run my own stuff.
Stream ripiping? More MAGA!
Love that Trump! Winning!
haven't pirated an mp3 since. what a waste of time hoarding music files is when you can just stream anything anywhere.
Strictly prohibited piracy, just like mixtapes from the 70s...
How is this any different than recording songs off the radio on to cassette tape. That was ruled nearly 50 years ago to be legitimate personal use.
Been ripping from random shoutcast stations since ages.. even setup scripts to filter out all kind of crap ;-)
Easy fix. Playback speed limiting.
That puts it in a similar category of recording music from the radio like your grandpa used to do in 1979. Non-story.
Man, I remember in the 80s when the music industry collapsed because people could cheaply and easily record music off the radio FOR FREE
Buncha freeloaders forcing record label management into slightly smaller mansions.
My computer has an audio output. My digital recorder has an audio input.
So, people can save files, they can rip streams, or they can hook up some extra hardware.
There is NO WAY to stop people from recording content that you choose to make available... so just deal with it.
Part of this is offline usage, part of it is ads.
Not everywhere has good reception. There are plenty of buildings around me that have 0% cell phone service (from any carrier) and no Wifi. If I am using a Youtube video in a presentation, it will certainly get downloaded so that the presentation goes smoothly and I don't have to worry about buffering or if it plays at all (or having to get permission to access a company's wifi, etc.).
I know school teachers who do the same thing. Many schools don't let teachers use Youtube in any form. So if a video exists on youtube that would be helpful to class, the teacher downloads it on a home PC and brings it in on a flash drive.
The other part is the unskippable ads in front of some clips. While Youtube's ad placement AI is decent, it is nowhere near perfect. Having an unskippable ad for "50 Shades Darker" play before the intended clip "Let's Count with Elmo" doesn't sit well with preschoolers, the school, the families, etc. Playing "Ad roulette" is enough to make people think twice about Youtube in any professional setting. Will it be a 5 second skippable ad? Will it be a "Content Plays after ad"? Will the ad be objectionable/unprofessional/NSFW to current audience?
If children are going to be using tablets on a long road trip or other activity where-not-screaming-bored-children is a good thing, favorite videos on the tablet (because no wifi on the road) is a good thing too. Netflix's downloadable shows certainly wins here.
I remember songs and sometimes replay them entirely in my head. Is that OK? What about if I sing along to the song in my head, and someone else hears?
the music of today (rap, bro country, pop), would the "quality" matter considering the junk blaring out of some car speakers you have to hear, driving down the road?
Ever more draconian laws and technology will never get piracy under control so stop expecting it.
I work for a living. I get paid, and that's the end of it. I don't get paid every time someone uses a window I installed or a door I made or lung I transplanted.
To hell with the entertainment industry and with IP in general.
Audio streaming won't come anywhere near any bandwidth limitations. Comcast's 300GB monthly limits means you can listen to music 24/7 and stream 1.5 HiDef movies a day and still be fine.
I can capture pure aac off the air of some great symfony performances with nothing but a $20 rtl dongle and https://github.com/theori-io/nrsc5/
I still keep a sound card capable of the record " What you hear " feature.
Fire up whatever audio editor you use, hit the record button, press play. Done.
Edit and save.
Good enough for workouts, car environments and non-audiophile demands.
If I really like the song, I DL it from Amazon and add it to the collection.
Simple as that.
Swear the RIAA just whines to whine these days.
In my country law allows consumer to record and even give copy to "close" friends. Heck goverment has budject category to pay compensations for this to copyright holders..
Problem is theres no decent service consumer could buy what he wants at consumer friendly price. And then some companies try to limits consumers rights to listen music to any device he might own...
I certainly hope it doesn't kill the music industry. Y'know, like it did last time. And the time before that.
If you can LISTEN to it, it can be ripped and "pirated". GET OVER IT! This is just as bad as the old "20/20" news show where they were demonizing "taping parties" and dual cassette decks back in the 80s. People always have copied music, people always WILL copy music. If you struggle to make money in the music industry, it's NOT because people are "stealing" from you, it's because you suck at marketing and possibly at making good music!
...you can pirate it. So obviously they need to sell CDs and MP3s that won't play and music players without speakers or any audio outs.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Because stream ripping is perfectly legal in analogy to recording radio to tape.
The only (and big) BUT is, that you need to have live access to the stream while ripping it. Downloading rips while the stream is down is not legal.
You probably can argue that some websites like youtube-downloader may be illegal as you're not directly ripping the stream, but I guess a court will rule what's the process and result, not the technical details.
And you can use the youtube-dl tool to rip yourself instead of using websites. It includes the youtube-music-grabber tool, which allows you to ripping the audio part of a video.
If I want to purchase a song but it's not available on iTunes/Amazon/etc for my country, is it really piracy?
No it's not, because piracy means sailing a ship on water and stealing physical goods.
#DeleteFacebook
Well the cat's out of the bag, we had a good run of ultra-convenient piracy. Back to torrrents where necessary I guess. I'm buying a lot of music DRM-free from Bandcamp these days anyway.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
A good friend of mine got his CPA as an older college student. Then he went to work for the big CPA firms in NYC. They used him for auditing and then spit him out at the end of audit season (after having told him, "You play your cards right and we'll put you on track to be a partner." Yeah, as if!). One audit he did is worth noting.
It seems this one former rocker whose group was filling the stadiums "back in the day" was accosted by a paparazzi and the rocker may have struck the paparazzi. He called his attorney when he got a letter from the alleged victim of his fist and asked for him to defend him. His attorney told him what it would cost to defend. The former rocker said, "But I'm broke!" His attorney said, "That's crazy—your music is still selling. In fact, my daughter just told me that she got your entire album from 1970-something on iTunes."
"I haven't received a royalty check for five years from anyone!" replied the former rocker.
His attorney, who drew up the contracts informed him that he had the "right to audit" the sales of his recordings. So, my friend Jim was hired to do the audit.
Here is what he found out:
To say the least, after the audit, the record company agreed to arbitration and wound up paying the members of the group unpaid moneys and had to pay interest to keep the story from the press. Jim never told me who the band was, but he did tell me that I would know right away who they were.
So, the next time you see the recording industry whining about people stealing "their" music, understand that it's the artist's music you are stealing—if you are, indeed, illegally copying music. But also understand that the recording industry, themselves, are just as guilty—they blame you for what they, themselves do.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
In reality, stream ripping isn't really much different to copying to cassette from the radio like everyone was doing in the 80's.
"But *this time around*, home taping will be killing the music. For sure. Honest !"
-- brought to you by the industry that keep crying "wolf".
(Under the command of CEOs who would like to outlaw the huming of copyrighted music)
{...} but I don't exactly think the music artists of large bands are really struggling for money.
The large bands aren't struggling for money anyway and won't feel the impact of piracy much.
The smaller bands are actually under horrendous contracts where they don't actually make that much money anyway. Piracy at least helps getting their music known, and might actually help them getting invited to play in some festivals. Helping them raise on the ladder.
(I don't have a concrete *music* example right of the top of my head, but lots of organisers are watching music popularity trends close to determine up going bands to invite. That also includes watching what happens on the piracy maket. /. )
Netflix is a well known *movie* example : they have admitted to also watch piracy popularity to determine which series to license. - there are even articles about this on
They tour because THAT's where they make most of their money.
It used to be that *discs* are where they made money, and concerts were glorified ads campaign for new discs.
Currently it's the opposite : there isn't much money in CDs (most of the money end up in the pockets of the label), or streaming, but it helps getting the band known, and then subsequently get invited to play at concerts).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well you need to find them an option where you get paid and the uses find the value. I personalty pay my monthly fee for YTred+GPM. Spotify has a free tier but i have been hearing lately its been song, ad, song, ad, ad, song ,ad.
when it's done for personal use. It's legal in the UK and likely the United States. Don't believe me, go read some interwebs. Ever hear of TiVo? You CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS RIAA/MPAA - GO phuck yourselves.
I pay $14.99/month for Apple Music and the entire family listens to whatever they want whenever they want. No tracking down rips, no messing about with torrents. We always listen through the AppleTV, headphones, or the car, and it's it being Apple has never stopped any of that from working. I imagine the same holds for Spotify, etc.
Piracy just doesn't seem worth the effort anymore. The time to proactively track down music as opposed to just throwing $15/month at having an instant search just isn't worth it.
All copies are virtually no different than my radio others tapes and my blank cassette tapes.
That is the fact jack and if you think otherwise I have some bridges for sale.
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
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
But what if Apple can make $14.99/mo on you, and the RIAA can sue you and settle for $10k-$100k?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
In the late 70’s and early 80’s I worked as a DJ in a roller rink. Kids would line up their boom-boxes along the wall and record our whole show. Then they’d play it back to their friends in the parking lot. The recorded sound was awful (those built in mics were crap, not that the speakers were much better), but they didn’t care. They had their music – the quality of which must have been augmented by the memories of it when they heard it over our actually pretty good Altec-Lansing sound system. They would have totally shit their pants to have the quality of a YouTube rip.
A shout out to anyone that ever skated at The Skate Ranch in Milan Illinois. I’m the guy that designed and built an Apple ][ controlled scoreboard style sign in the parking light with 8,556 light bulbs (in four colors none the less). I’m talking full text scrolling, animation, and WYSIWYG on the monitor. Circa 1980. I was the shiz before I went to college (self taught programming and TTL logic circuit design). Now I'm struggling to keep up with the new kids.
Letter To Iran
What the hell were people expecting? Mobile data costs a shitload. Why would anyone stream over their portable device (aka the most convenient/commonly used device), when they can download to it and replay as often as they want and save on data usage charges.
Gonna have to look into it.... for educational purposes
This isn't in any way immoral, it's just that companies only want you to be able to listen to music while they shove ads down your throat and/or keep you on a contract. To those i say: Fuck you, start paying your artists and just wait until we criminalize corruption (aka lobbying).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
youths of today are clearly incredibly stupid. They need a "service" to "stream-rip". Back in my day, the dual-tape-deck had a record button. You pushed it. It would record radio, or the other tape, or the cd. Today, windows has a record button too. Hit it in your favourite free audio app. Perfect digital copy.
As for any concept of value/fairness/ethics...
First off, the value of music is the live performance. Pay to see the band and have the experience. I go to two dozen theatrical shows every year.
Second, the "stream", as it were, is being produced by hardware that I own. My speakers, my cables, my computer. So the "performance", as it were, is all mine. My computer is "covering" the original. So the value of the music is already reduced to the licencing cost that a cover-band would pay to perform the say.
Third, I'm performing it for me, myself, and I. Hardly a public for-profit scenario.
It's little more than the sheet-music, since the always-perfect musician is sitting on my desk, owned by me.
Yes I buy CDs, to support to artists that I see live. Do I play them? No. Music through speakers just sucks. But I want them to return to my local theatre. Gotta support the tour.
When I was a kid, I'd bring over blank cassettes to a friend's house and record his older brother's CDs. That was the rampant form of music piracy at the time. This never changes.
I see my shadow changing, stretching up and over me...
This doesn't sound any different than when I was a kid and we used to record songs off the radio onto a cassette tape.
Speaking of which
Argument in the comments between people who claimed they could hear the tones above 16kHz and those who claimed there were no such tones.
16 kHz is close to 15 kHz : that high pitched "mosquitoe" hum that analog TV set, and some un-plugged PC CRT sceen did, and that only some people heard.
Not everybody could hear them (age is a factor).
That shows you that even if the sound was delivery losslessly, not everybody could hear it.
the OPUS stream contained the original signal descending from 20kHz but all of the AAC streams had artificially chopped off everything above 16kHz.
Considering the above (not everybody is able to hear the 15kHz mosquito hum of an old analog TV set), clamping AAC is a safe bet and a good compromise for compression, probably nobody is going to pay attention to 15 kHz and up frequencies in the middle of a complexe piece of music.
OPUS' clip at 20 kHz is by design. It's designed for human listeners, and we lack any receptor for such high frequency. There's no point in recording and keeping something that could not be heard anyway. If you have a special corner case use where you do need that frequency, don't use a general purpose codec like this (FLAC would be better).
(That would be like trying to record the UV and IR light in photographs of your vacations.
UV and IR photography is *a thing* in some scientific fields (e.g.: astronomy, medical imaging.), but there's no point in recording it for everyday picture - the eye's len don't let any UV through, and the receptors of the eye don't even react to high energy UV* nor to IR. R/G/B is plenty enough for everyday pictures).
The same way photography is designed for humans and not pistol shrimps/bees/etc. and thus R/G/B is enough,
the same way OPUS is designed for humans and not for dogs and thus 20 kHz is enough.
---
*: there's a thin band of near UV that could be picked up by the retina, but would burn and damage the retina, so the len has evolved to block it.
Some early-gen cataract replacement artificial lens where transparent at that wavelength, enabling cataract-operation patients to see this tiny bit of UV, at least until they burn their retina.
Still it's definitely NOT something you need to record for your vacation pictures. R/G/B will suffice.
Turned out it depended which audio stream Youtube was sending to the listener
And that's a pretty dumb idea (posting your "sound test" on youtube) to begin with.
Youtube is designed to share regular music/speech over internet, heavily compressed to make it easier to stream and cheaper to store.
Your wierd audio test is guaranteed to hit some unusual corner case and suffer heavily from the compression.
What did the uploader expect ?!?
"Hey I'm trying to record bats' calls using an oldschool portable tape recorder and it doesn't work !"
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]