From P2P Filesharing to Stream Ripping
Linking in with what Sue said in the lecture yesterday, past MSTU2000 staff member and web geek Axel Bruns reports:As if the music industry didn't have enough to worry about: Slashdot reports that users are now Shifting from P2P to Stream Ripping - that is, using their computers to 'tape' online radio stations 24 hours a day. Quality is good (and getting better); song IDs enable sorting and selection of incoming songs - as broadband spreads and bandwidth increases, this virtually untraceable brute-force approach to downloading music might really become a viable alternative...My Creative Soundblaster Audigy even comes bundled with an application called Audio Stream Recorder, that allows to to copy and paste in any URL (e.g. of a web radio stream), hit record, and then dump it to an audio editor where you can cut it up (or not) for your future listening pleasure. As Axel says, the increased takeup of broadband has allowed both higher quality audio streams and the resources on the other end to record large quantities of music.
Thoughts on this? I'm thinking particularly about the different sonic and cultural space of online radio as opposed to the interface of Kazaa or soulseek - which is more intense in terms of subcultural identity; or, which of them better enables musical exploration; or, which of them connects more to the ideas about online community etc. As well as all the obvious implications for Copyfight issues.
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