Thursday, January 25, 2007

Free Music

I've had several folks ask me about capturing free music streams, so I thought I would post the steps here. It reminds me a lot of recording the music from radio stations when I was in high school...

There are three basic steps.

First, you'll need to get the music player, Winamp. Download the player of choice (free or "pro" version) from:

http://www.winamp.com/

Next, you'll need to get a plug-in. While Winamp allows you to listen to music streams from the internet, it lacks that key "record" button. The Streamripper plugin can be found here.

I believe (this is from memory now) that you want to download the srwa5-1.61.27.exe file to your PC and execute it (so it installs). I recall some challenges there, but everything worked out nicely after I stopped stressing about what I THOUGHT the instructions wanted me to do and just applied common sense. As such, I think it's pretty straightforward.

This plugin (when you install it right) will automatically open when Winamp starts. It will present a "record" button, and give you various options for recording the stream of music. I use the option to break the stream up into separate songs, each song into its own MP3 file. You can customize it pretty well.

Finally, you need a source of music. I like to use Shoutcast.

They have a pretty good selection of tunes (e.g., SKYFM) at a decent bit rate (120, 160).

After I've loaded up a bunch of songs onto my PC, I transfer them to my MP3 player, which is an iRiver T-10 (2GB).

A nice thing about this approach is that I can apply equalization at two places: in Winamp during the recording (well, certainly during playback - have not checked to see if it actually applies it to the recording process now that I think about it...) and inside the MP3 player. This allows me to really get the equalization dialed in the way I like it.

Finally, what to listen on??? For light listening, I like the Sennheiser PX-100. It's a fairly low-priced open air style headphone that delivers amazingly good results. For noisier environments, I use the Sennheiser HD280 Pro. The sound quality delivered by these headphones is nothing short of amazing. With a 32db noise reduction from the closed design, all you hear is the music. Just as it should be.