Getting free music legally?

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Just recently I've not been consuming enough music. I use to follow dance music alot but I've been consuming too much Television and Movies from UKnova and Suprnova. They do have music too but usually popular albums rather than the edgy underground stuff I listen to. Plus they rarely do tracks rather than full albums. So I've been thinking about using a p2p client like Shareaza again to share and trade tracks.

But then again I was reading Xeni Jarden's article about putting the share back into filesharing. I keep meaning to check out the links and see if its any good. However the ripping off live radio is back in fashion and much more accessable than ever before. Streamripper seems to be the application which all others is copying. Streamripper is Opensource (GPL) and runs on Windows and OSX, so there seems to be little reason why you cant compile it for other platforms? For those new to all this, basicly this application will rip what it hears streamed. It will use ID3 tags to create the individual mp3 files with the right meta and filenames. Plus its actually not against the law to record it for personal use. I have yet to try it yet, but I'm going to try it this weekend for sure… I've been tempted to do it at work, except I would have no way to take all the tunes home after work. Maybe this is a good time to get that 160gig drive (55 pounds plus vat is going rate at the moment) for my external harddrive enclosure?

Update, installed the version for Winamp 5 and it worked like a dream. Creates nice folders for each stream. But you can configure all those options. My main problem is once again bandwidth, I had 3 torrents going on while doing streamripping and so any long dj mixes ended up as parts in the incomplete folder. But any tunes shorter than 10mins long were fine. I highly recommend streamripping over kazaa or any other weird p2p app. Lets just hope the induce act isnt copied over here in europe.

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Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io