All The Music You Want For Free
As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.
Oh. My. God.
I’ve never been to Last.fm even though I’d heard of it. I found this proclamation as the lead item on techmeme and decided to give it a try.
I entered the name of a song. It got all confused. Apparently searches must be done by artist’s name or band name.
OK, so I put in the name of a band.
Then the player got confused, said it was having trouble streaming what I wanted to hear.
OK. I selected an alternate track from that band, a song I’d never heard.
Before hitting Play, however, I set up a certain piece of software I have.
I set it to Record.
Then I hit Last.fm’s Play button.
Three minutes later, I had a copy of that song. I played it back. Sounded the same. It might not have, though; there could have been some digital magic to prevent that.
A minute after playback, I had my copy saved as an MP3 with a sample rate of 22050 Hz and a bitrate of 128 kb/s. If I had ripped it from a CD, I would have used a higher bitrate. (I’m not sure if the software I used can do that; I might or might not bother to see.)
Now I can play it as many times as I want.
And that band is screwed.
No more payment after that single play I did.
So no, I won’t say anything about how I did this. It was an experiment. I was checking for DRM. It doesn’t seem to be there. There might be watermarking, though, so anyone who grabs a bunch of stuff and puts it up on P2P is an eejit deserving of the hell they get. So Don’t Do That.
As for that track I ripped? Hang on a bit. There. Sent to the Recycle Bin. Deleted.
And Comments are closed for this post.
I don’t want to be bothered by eejits asking me how to do that. I won’t say.
Artists should be paid.
Their damned landlords are.
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Mike Cane 2008 