Recording Internet Radio for private use is legal in most countries. It is an excellent way to increase the own music collection legally in short time. You find several free and many paid applications on the Internet that offer to record Internet Radio but none that worked so well as the Stripper and Streamripper combination.

Stripper is a Java frontend for Streamripper that offers and easy to use interface with the option to add and record multiple Internet Radio stations simultaneously. Both applications are available for a variety of operating systems including Windows and Linux.

I would begin by installing Streamripper on the system. Stripper itself is a JAR file that can be executed without installation if the Java Runtime Environment is installed on the system. It asks for a few preferences at start, most notably the path to streamripper.exe and the path where the music should be saved in.

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Animated Gifs are mostly a phenomenon of the past and one only comes occasionally upon a website that makes excessive use of them. Those are either websites that have been laid to rest for a very long time by their owner, forums where users post all kinds of images or social community websites like Myspace.

Some make great forum avatars on the other hand. I remember one that showed a bug crawling around that looked so real that I tried to get it off my monitor the first time I saw it.

Anyway, if you are into animated gifs you might like Gickr.com which offers a service to convert Youtube videos into animated gifs. All online with minimal user input. I have created one from videos that I found at Youtube, you see it below.

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DRM (Digital Rights Management) is slowly getting out of company executive heads and several stores are successfully selling music that is DRM free. That’s a good thing for the customer who can transfer the songs that he bought to other devices and even burn them on CD if he likes. We are however not at the point where most users would like to be.

A current trend seems to be to include identifying tags into the downloaded music. While that is not a huge problem if you keep a close eye on your music collection you could run into troubles if someone would steal your computer, notebook or mp3 player. Besides that every single song is available on those networks anyway.

It’s a gray area legally in my opinion and I would suggest to everyone to remove the identifying information from those songs.

continue reading "Remove Identifying Information from Rhapsody MP3s"

To put it short: SoundCloud is a social network for musicians and professionals in the music business. At least that’s the market the website is aiming for, other users (like me) can also join if they are lucky enough to get an invitation. No other website that I know of gives the user that much control over the music that he is uploading to the SoundCloud website.

It all starts with an upload obviously. Not your usual pick a song and hit a button type of upload though. You do pick a song but can add a wealth of information to the upload including an extensive description, genre, bpm, record label, catalogue number, release data, track number, keywords and even a buy this track link.

Artwork can be added as well and a decision has to be made if the song should be publicly or privately accessible. If the latter is chosen users can be picked from the list of followers and followed or by email. Emails will be send to users with a direct link to the song so that they can access it at the SoundCloud website. Those users have to chose a password for the first time and can use that password to access that song and any other that they are invited to.

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Media Player Classic Home Cinema Edition is a Media Player Classic modification that is especially catering towards Home Cinema users. It makes use of the basic key elements of Media Player Classic such as the low resource usage and compatibility to the most popular video formats out of the box.

The Home Cinema edition adds a few handy functions and features to Media Player Classic. It adds a function to remove tearing, additional video decoders such as H.264 and VC-1 with DXVA support, support for EVR renderer and better Windows Vista support including a release for 64-bit versions of Windows Vista.

The modification also adds several language translations which may come in handy for users who prefer a version in their own language. Definitely one of the best choices for media PCs. Runs extremely well on low end PCs.

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