Posted by Drewdawg on 02/19/07 00:15

Larry wrote:
> Would it be legal for me to take a standard FM radio, tuned to my
> favorite classic rock station, connect it to my computer (from the
> headphone jack on the radio to the mic jack on my sound card) and let
> it dump into WAV format onto my large capacity hard drive all day,
> then come home and manually edit the WAV files into individual songs,
> encode them into MP3, and add the tags?

Sounds perfectly legal to me. Just a modern variant of what I've done in the
past (80s) with cassettes.

>Would I be able to prove
> that the MP3s were not downloaded?

The key is the audio processing for FM. Optimod and similar processors have
a very distinct sound because the audio compression on most FM stations is
multi-band meaning slices of the bandwidth are processed separately for an
even louder sound for maximum modulation.

Most ripped CD tracks have no audio compressions and any dynamic differences
which could be attributed to mp3 don't come close to what you get from FM
radio.

That and you'd have the DJ talking over the track.

Drewdawg
Getting free music from FM since 1981

[Back to original message]