How To: Rip MySpace Music To mp3

This is a comprehensive guide to ripping music from myspace.com (or any other website for that matter) to your computer. Music artists on myspace can choose to allow their music to be downloaded, though often they choose not to. From the research i have done, there is no indication that ripping the music is illegal. The music is offered for our consumption, whether we choose to encode it to an mp3 for personal use later or not, is none of their business (I think they wish it was).

We Will Use:

• Audacity - Audio editing freeware
• Some artists myspace page
• Basic computer skills

Getting Audacity

Audacity is a great program, its open source and completely free. It doesn't come with support for mp3 encoding straight away, you will need to download a seperate library.

First, download and install Audacity: Audacity Download Page

Next, download and unzip mp3 ecoding library: Lame mp3

Setting up Audacity

Audacity needs to be setup to listen to your computer speakers, so it hears what you hear. Thats why this is so great, you can now rip anything you can listen to on your computer, to an mp3.

Open up Audacity

Select "Stereo Mix" from the list in the top right corner.

Click Edit > Preferences (Ctrl+P). Select 2 Channel Recording (ie. recording in stereo, not mono).

Ripping

Now the good bit, time to rip some music. Open up the myspace page and listen to the song once through to make sure its been downloaded by your browser (You should see the blue bar growing, thats the download happening. When that reaches the end a goes away, its finished). Don't press stop!! Press pause for now, pressing stop will make the download start again.

NOTE: make sure nothing else is going to make sound while your recording (eg. set your MSN status to busy).

Back in Audacity, hit Record (big red circle, next to play). Move back to the myspace page, and drag the slider back to the start.

The song should start playing from the start and Audacity will capture it all. You might need to adjust the volume on the myspace player. Play around with it until you get a good recording volume, it should look something like this below. Drag the slider back to the start again once you've found a good volume (dont worry about restarting the recording in Audacity). Hit stop in Audacity once the song is finished.

Cleaning Up

Now you have your recording, but you'll have some extra bits hanging off either end, before the song started, and after it finished. With Audacity we will delete these bits, everything before the song starts, and some of the excess at the end. Select it with your cursor, and hit Delete or Ctrl+K.

Exporting As mp3

Last step, goto File > Export As MP3...

Now it will show a warning message, asking "Would you like to locate lame_enc.dll now?". Hit Yes, and find the file where you extracted it at the start of the tutorial.

Next you can write the ID3 tag information for the new mp3. That's the information inside the file that music players like Windows Media Player or iTunes read (or edit), it lets them know the song name, artist, album, etc.

And let it do its thing...

Done!

Enjoy responsibly.

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