Stationripper Record Internet Radio Streams

It's completely legal to record music from radio in my country and it's also legal to record radio streams that are broadcast on the Internet. Stationripper is one of those handy tools that allows you to record audio streams with ease. All you need to do is download the freeware utility and run it.

You can use it to save Internet radio streams, for instance those found on the Shoutcast directory, to your local system. While you can't use it to download select music only, you can pick radio stations that play music that you like to increase the chance that you will enjoy the music that you download this way.

The tools main features are:

• Record Shoutcast Audio and Video streams, iTunes Radio, Podcasts, Pandora.com, and Last.fm.
• Records up to 600 streams at one time.
• Buy the music you are recording.
• Be part of our community - help decide what the best stations are!
• Auto-download Album art.
• Use with iTunes - auto-generate iTunes playlists of songs recorded.
• Use with Media Monkey - auto-generate MediaMonkey playlists of songs recorded.
• Keeps track of the songs you've already recorded, only keeping the songs you don't already have.
• Lets you easily find stations to record, via the StationRipperTM Portal, Shoutcast, or other web sites. Or you can drag and drop from iTunes radio to start recording.
• Keeps a list of the music and stations you've recorded, allowing easy playback and re-recording of stations.
• Listen to any station being recorded with a single mouse click.
• Ignore songs under a certain size.

You find additional information on the official homepage that I linked to above. The authors claim that they've been able to download more than 2000 songs in a period of 3,5 hours recording multiple streams at once. Just add your favorite stations from shoutcast.com and give it a try.

Update: Stationripper is still available as a free version but severely limited, as it is only possible to download 25 songs per start with it if you do not upgrade to the commercial version.  Alternatives that do not have those restrictions are the excellent Stream Harvester and Streamripper, both allowing you to download an unlimited amount of Internet radio tracks.