A lot of my friends download music. I tend to be one who listens to the radio to get my music fix. Recently I decided to write a program that would make it simple and easy to stream music on your computer. You can see what I am talking about here Link After showing it to a few of my friends they have stopped downloading music and started just streaming the stations that they like, they never even realized that there were a lot of high quality internet stations out there. What I am wondering is how many people realize that they can stream music for free? The other thing is, in the older version of my program it could download the stream and save it to individual files. The thing is, it’s a legal way to download mp3s. At least I think it is :/ Well you can record the radio to a tape and use it for personal purposes. I don’t see why you can’t save music from a stream as long as you use the music for private purposes.

If you want to save music from a stream check out the Streamripper project Link The only thing is, it some times has problems saving each song to an individual file with out cutting off parts of one song and adding them to another. Like 1-5seconds off, doesn’t sound that bad, but it can get kind of annoying unless the songs are played back in the same order that you recorded them. My project Streamer Link Was originally my attempt to do what Streamripper does. I started it before I knew about Streamripper and was able to get my files saved with 4-8seconds off. I used the same techniques that Streamripper does so there still isnt a perfect way to seperate each song. You could possibly save it all as one large file and then manually cut out each song.

Anyway I was also wondering how many people that have broadband and are just looking for something to listen to while they are on their computers would use my program. Sure there are plenty of other programs that will play the same streams (winamp, foobar2000). But what I was trying to go for with my program was just something that you could quickly pick a station to listen to and leave it to play and not have to bother with it. If you have any constructive criticism to leave about my program be sure to either leave it on the forum here or my site.

Theoretically it is illegal to stream music as well. any music that one individual purchases is for a single use license. therefore you can not share music that you do not own the copyright to, at least without paying the different music associations some money.

i for one have always copied music. for one the music i listen to is concidered a novelty item and therefore a CD is about 30 to 60 bucks. a little to rich for my blood. i do buy a cd when i have the chance. but most of the things i listen to or are trying to replace are already out of print. if i can find it on line then great... if not oh well..... if i can find a cd for cheap i buy it...i'd rather have the original than a copy any day. just because i don't like whats on the radio....... as for recording tht is against the law as well. any copy of anything that you did not produce yourself can not be held on any media for more than 24 hours without holding the original media in your possesion. so all thouse PSX games i backed up before my 3 yr. broke them are illegal because i don't have the originals....broken as tehy may have been i must keep those for the copies to be legal.

kind of off the music software topic though.......sorry guys

The only reason why people bother about legal or not is the RIAA and its stupid lawyers. Why should someone sing a song once and be paid a fortune afterwards because idiots made a law telling us it is otherwise illegal listening to music????? Humans have the right to listen to music.

Use one of the modern programs that protects your privacy. I have used Earthstation 5 for a while, it is not so bad as many write and now I am using Zultrax. Safely hidden from the RIAA file-sharing just continues.