25 October 2004
Currently Listening To
I added the Glass arias to the Radio from the Ether playlist. Ripping audio from a stream and converting it to MP3s is ... hypothetically, mind you ... is tedious. Even unemployed, I think my time is worth more than that.
If you wanted to do this hypothetical thing, you could purchase Rhapsody or a similar service to stream the audio you want to rip, or you could just listen to Internet radio and wait for the songs you want. Then install the free All2WAV recorder that serializes audio to a WAV file as it plays on your PC. Depending on how much music it is, it could be a very big WAV file (hypothetically a couple of hundred meg for a CD of arias). If you've recorded several tracks to one WAV file, you need to partition them out. Otherwise, you'll have to re-live the days of making mix tapes from the radio and pausing and recording each song separately. I enjoyed those days, but hypothetically I'd rip to one big file.
There may be free editors out there that can cut apart audio files, but I use Cakewalk Home Studio since I own it. CWHS will both segment the files and convert them to MP3s (although you must purchase the Fraunhofer MP3 codec). There are many free WAV to MP3 converters out there, but I can't vouch for their bit-rate. Fraunhofer provides a table illustrating bit-rate and audio quality.
Voila.
Now, I've also hypothetically heard that you can download very reliably from newsgroups if you 1. pay for access to a news server (such as Giganews) that publishes and retains binaries groups, and 2. aquire news reader software that re-assembles multipart binaries. I've heard that this is a very reliable source of high-quality audio.
For everything I listen to, I'm still pro-purchase.
- The vinyl and the concert posted by sstrader on 21 May 2016 at 1:59:26 PM
- Rod McKuen posted by sstrader on 22 March 2016 at 8:58:35 PM
- More political transcriptions posted by sstrader on 20 March 2016 at 10:19:06 AM
- Notes on We Don't Care About Music Anyway posted by sstrader on 7 June 2015 at 1:06:34 PM
- Ives Concord Sonata posted by sstrader on 13 February 2015 at 5:13:17 PM