Digital Repentance

It's been said before (I think by me, actually) that, regardless of your feelings about religion, you can't live in Israel and ignore Yom Kippur. The air is full of penitence, the streets are full of people walking to shul and empty of cars, and even if you were inclined to stay inside and while the day away in front of the TV, you wouldn't find much to watch. Instead, you'll probably find yourself in synagogue at some point during the day, like most of us.

Yom Kippur is all about sin and repentance, and chances are you will pick up a machzor, a special holiday prayerbook, and recite some of the penitential prayers, which include numerous confessions worshippers recite throughout the day.

Now, most of us realize that we are not the righteous Jews we should be, but most of the sins we can recall are minor league compared to the ones listed in the confession. Things like pushing in the post office line, cutting off drivers in heavy traffic, and ignoring those dunning TV tax nudnik bills, are the kinds of misdemeanors the vast majority of us are guilty of. The heavy liturgy of the Yom Kippur prayers, we feel, does not necessarily apply to us. "We have murdered? " Well, unless ants and mosquitoes count, most of us are not murderers. "We have corrupted? " Unless you're a TV producer for one of those raunchy HBO shows, you probably haven�t had much opportunity to ruin the morals of others. "We have stolen? " Like from a bank? Not likely.

Whoa� back up there. If you have used a P2P downloading tool to get music, you may have some explaining to do. Is downloading music files really "stealing? " It is, in the sense that you are violating a point of law. Whether the law is right or wrong, whether copyright owners have a right to prevent electronic dissemination of MP3s, whether it is "better " for the music industry for fans to share a band's work, since it will make them more likely to buy an album, is beside the point. Copyright law is very clear (http://www.templetons.com/brad//copymyths.html) that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works, even for free, is at least a violation of civil law, and in some cases a felony - even if "everyone " does it, and even if the record company is rolling in dough, and even if you would never have plunked down money for the song anyway, etc.

We Jews believe that there is a sort of balance in the universe when it comes to sin and its consequences (not that I'm an expert on these sorts of things, but I did ask a rabbi). Eventually, say the sages, the wrongdoer gets what is coming to him or her. Although it seems unlikely that even a serial file sharer will be sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the organization behind the spate of lawsuits against P2P program users, it's not uncommon to find users of Kazaa and other file sharing programs who report that, along with the goodies, they downloaded some "baddies " as well - in the form of viruses that caused them all sorts of trouble, sometimes to the extent that they had to reformat their hard drives. Thus are the wages of sin, at least sometimes.

But even if you are savvy enough to avoid trashing your computer with a phony download, there is still the moral aspect of using P2P to get music. Some of us just feel uncomfortable with the idea of violating someone else's rights - even those of big music conglomerates, who are certainly not going to lose out if lil' old us grab a few measly MP3s. It's not what we should be aspiring to, at least. And besides, why download music files illegally, when there is a (currently) perfectly legal way to get all the music you could possibly want?

Forget Kazaa and other P2P programs for downloading music; it's too much work, too risky, and too morally questionable. The right way to do it is to use Stationripper, a neat little program that will automatically download as many as 300 songs at a time painlessly and, at least for the most part, legally.

Stationripper is a song ripper - meaning that it downloads streaming radio music files being played over the Internet as Shoutcasts (http://yp.shoutcast.com), the Internet broadcasting format for Winamp, the free MP3 player by Nullsoft (www.winamp.com/). There are thousands of Shoutcast servers playing a wide variety of music, from the latest top 40 to classical to folk and ethnic - even Hebrew. You check out a stream you want to listen to on the Shoutcast Web site, click on the Listen button, and the stream is automatically played through your Winamp application.

Winamp supports MP3 ID tags, which means that it displays the name of the file- the song - that is currently playing in the application window. Winamp does the same for streaming Shoutcasts, identifying each file individually as it is being played..

Stationripper (http://www.stationripper.com/download.htm), which is related to Streamripper, a program we discussed about a year ago, is actually a very straightforward idea; it acts like a Winamp plugin (although it is a standalone program); but instead of playing the file being streamed by the Shoutcast broadcast in Winamp, it simply writes the file to your hard drive for you to play back later. The progam's window displays the actual Shoutcast Web page and the songs that are being played at that moment; clicking the play button in Stationripper's version of the Shoutcast Web site will record the file instead of play it. And each file gets separated according to the ID tag it contains as it streams from the Shoutcast broadcaster.

Since your disk can handle many more song files being written to it at one time than your ears can handle listening to, you can use Stationripper to write multiple files - as many as 300 separate files from as many Shoutcasts at one time! You'd need a really powerful computer and extremely broad Internet connection to successfully stream so many songs at one time, but even average connections - 56K modems and 256mb ADSL connections, for example - should have no problem recording 4 or 5 Shoutcasts at one time. At that rate, you can get yourself a gigabyte of music - hundreds of songs - within 2 or 3 hours! The only drawback, of course, is that you don't control the content; the broadcaster does, and the broadcaster's tastes and playlist may not always be exactly what you want. However, there are so many streams to choose from in so many formats, you can probably build a nice music library of your favorites in less than a week.

Besides, the broadcasting aspect of Shoutcast is what makes Stationripper kosher as a way of downloading music. Streaming Internet radio is regulated by the Small Webcasters Amendment Act of the Digital Performance Rights in Sound Recordings Act, which allows Internet broadcasters to stream music for a fee of about $2,000 - $5,000 per year, depending on the number of listeners. Once a Shoutcast broadcaster pays that fee, s/he can legally stream that file - just like a broadcast radio station. And you can record that file - just like recording off FM radio.

This, at least, is the current situation. So far, the RIAA has not weighed in on the Stationripper phenomenon. And there are Shoutcasters who do not pay their fee, which means they themselves are illegally streaming files. But surely a large broadcaster like the UK's Virgin Radio, which runs about 5 Shoutcasts, pays their fee, as does Soma FM (http://www.somafm.com/), whose nudging of Congress was partially responsible for the passage of the Webcaster amendment. The Shoutcast list usually has a link to the Webcaster's home page, which will make very clear the station's legal status. Perhaps one reason "Big Radio " has not gone after Stationripper yet is because the experience is indeed very much like radio - complete with station breaks and commercials, in some cases. But of the thousands of songs I streamed researching this article, only a few dozen had chit chat or station identification in them. The only problem I consistently experienced was some extra beats at the beginning or the end of songs, as the broadcaster did a crossfade from/to the song I was recording. If it bothered me, I could use one of the numerous free MP3 editors available, like Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/windows.php), that would allow me to restore the song to its pristine natural state.

But I have no problem with the occasional voiceover - in fact, I look at it as a source of pride. I may not be the most righteous guy out there, Lord knows, but at least I managed to do one thing right for Yom Kippur.

September 24

2004

David Shamah

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