Streamripper: Forget the Past

Some of you may remember the days of the cassette tape. Relatively simple in design and quality, but still useful if you wanted to record music from your favorite radio station or create that famous mix tape. However, due to the nature of the tapes, it was very difficult to record specific songs and even more difficult to split those songs up. Luckily, things are much simpler now.

The advent of online radio brought about a revolution in how we listen to music. With the click of a button, we can access thousands of radio stations. When it was first released, the technology surrounding them was not all that advanced. However, as our understanding of the system increased, so did the technology that dealt with it.

Online radio is streamed over the Internet and into the users computer. It is now possible to not only catch these streams, but to split them into individual files. This means that with the right software, the user can easily record their favorite music right to their computers. How is this possible? Each stream is compiled of special tags that identify the songs included inside the stream. Using the right software these tags can be read, recorded, and split up while the music is being streamed into the computer. Leaving you with a new collection of music—perfectly split up by song name, artist and genre.

This process can completed numerous ways, but my favorite approach utilizes my favorite media player—Winamp. I briefly went over Winamp’s design in my previous article, but today we will discuss its ability to stream online radio.

Once you have Winamp, the next step is to download the plugin Streamripper.

Then follow these directions to get Streamripper to work with Winamp. I prefer using Shoutcast, but others will work as well.
If you are having trouble, make sure to uncheck “Use the old way…”

The final result:

Enjoy!