[Enigmatic Entity]

I'm just wondering - with the massive bandwidth allowances you can now get, why is it OK to stream music or "buffer" it, but not "save target as"?

Buffering downloads the file to your computer anyway, and it seems legal. A person with unlimited internet can listen to 1000's of songs as many times as they like.

[General Battuta]

Redistribution.

The same thing people get sued for by the RIAA.

You can't redistribute a streaming file.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

They did force all the radio stations to quit streaming music at one time until the industries came to a resolution.  That was years ago though.  I'm guessing part of the resolution was the ability to not save it.  Of course that doesn't prevent you from hooking your output into your mic and recording it that way but it makes it more work.

[Blue Lion]

It's the same way you can record songs off the radio

[Mikes]

It's the same way you can record songs off the radio

Exactly.

[Nuke]

ive used audacity to record many a stream out there. and usually with digital precision (no digital-analog-digital conversion) thanks to optical audio ports. seems media companies can save a lot of bandwidth by letting people save songs they listen to a lot. but apparently the one or two ads they insert per hundred songs and no one clicks on is enough to pay for the hundreds of megabits of bandwidth that gets wasted by everyone every minute. seems like an incredibly efficient way to slow down the entire internet.

seems the music industry can create a lot more cashflow simply by running their own download and torrent sites. rather than letting kiddies re-download the album theyve been listinging to for a month, over and over again. they go to such lengths to protect their copywrites, and then give the music away for free provided your constantly wasting bandwidth. or perhaps thats what they wanted *dawns tinfoil hat*

[voidSkipper]

Yes. The music industry exists only to cripple the nation of Australia, with our metered-by-the-megabyte internet connections.

I tried internet radio for a while, but it was simply not acceptable from a bandwidth usage point of view.

[Titan]

last.fm has turned into an ass. You get to listen to a full song only a couple times, then if you got to play it, it only plays the little clip and a popup says something about a beta service for listening to songs which would mean you have to pay to hear them.

The only problem I have with that is the tone that it's worded in.



I think streaming is ok because something downloaded can be put on an ipod/mp3player

[Stealth]

it's like that in many industries i think.

like how you're allowed to watch a movie on TV, but not record it

[iamzack]

Streaming is like loaning someone a book. Downloading is like putting the book into a photocopier and giving the copy away.

Could potentially cut into profits if it happens enough.

[The E]

No, actually, streaming is holding a book up for someone to read.

[Herra Tohtori]

Although I might be preaching for the choir... Please note that the majority of "streaming" services in the internets are not streaming anything. They are mostly flash applets that download the file in it's entirety into your browser cache and play it from there.

It is retardedly simple to open the cache in file manager and copy-paste-rename the appropriate files if one wants to, and the only thing preventing you from doing it might be willingness to abide by the license agreement of the service in question (which likely forbids you to make local copies; however I personally don't see much of a difference between a file in cache and file somewhere else so it's something of a line drawn in water anyway).

Real streaming is somewhat different, and used for different purposes. Like internet radio channels. Or podcasts. Or NASA TV. Real streaming always requires the transfer rate to be at least the same as the bit rate in the media; this is not the case in, say, YouTube or other video sites. If you have slower connection, you can just pause it and it downloads the video, letting you to watch it later when it's downloaded entirely into local cache.

Not that real time streams aren't really easy to copy for future use as well, but that's neither here nor there.

Legally, I don't think it's any more acceptable to put up songs or stuff for streaming than it is to put them up as direct downloads, but technological ignorance from behalf of both users and rights holders has so far prevented this from becoming much of an issue. Although some rights holders do seem to be on a YouCrusade to get their stuff out of Tubes.

[iamzack]

Also, music streamers, like radios, pay to play the music they play.

[Kosh]

Redistribution.

The same thing people get sued for by the RIAA.

You can't redistribute a streaming file.

Maybe you could write some kind of program to collect the temporary files it makes. Wouldn't be so far fetched.

[General Battuta]

Two posts up, my friend...

[BloodEagle]

Why write a new program at all? Just use (as posted above/pointed out) Audacity's Stereo Mix (or other applicable option) to directly record the audio.

[Herra Tohtori]

...or VLC's stream capture features (output to file).

Recording the audio is a surefire way to get things to work, but the problem in that is that you don't get the original file/stream, you get a render of it recorded on whatever accuracy you use, and when you further save the PCM wav file into mp3, ogg or whatnot, it'll suffer some additional compression that causes cumulative artefacts and the quality is somewhat reduced as a result compared to direct stream capture.

[Enigmatic Entity]

If you record streaming audio at 44100Hz and encode it at 192kbps mp3, basically all you are doing is adding a little bit of sound card carrier wave to the original mp3 and then re-encoding it. I don't know how bad an audio file can get if you keep re-encoding it at the same bit rate over and over again, but twice [one form the site, one from your prog.] is satisfactory for most speakers if the original is better than 128kbps.