A quick step guide that will show you how to rip audio from MySpace and any other site that allows you to stream and listen to it on your PC.
This guide is a followup to a previous one on "How to Download Videos From YouTube and MySpace." There are many audio files available for playback on the venerable MySpace site yet, very few are available as downloads.
There have been many times where I've come across a cool track only to be dismayed that it's "owner" has disabled the download function and been forced to visit the page each time I wished to hear it. Well, no more will you or I be impeded by such DRM-esque limitations for here in this guide I will show you how to rip whatever tracks your heart desires and save them on your PC.
The first thing we will need is a sound recording program. There are many to choose from, my personal favorite being High Criteria's Total Recorder, but we will select a free, open source, program to make this guide accessible for all.
We're going to use Audacity 1.2.4b, a pretty solid recording and editing program which is also fairly easy to use and configure.
Below are the download links for each OS available, choose yours accordingly, download and install.
Follow through the prompts and install as requested. Then launch Audacity when finished.
As you can see in the picture below, there are a number of bells and whistles that this program offers, with additional plugins available from the Audacity website.
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The only configuring we need to do here is to select our desired audio recording device, which will be "Wave Out Mix" as pictured below.
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Now it's time to find some audio tracks to rip.
A good friend of mine is the lead-singer for a band called The Wagon here in San Diego and has been kind enough to allow me to use his band's music on MySpace for this tutorial.
CLICK HERE to visit The Wagon's MySpace site.
The image below is of the band's page. Notice how the top two songs are available for download and the bottom two are not. We're going to rip the second song from the top titled "End of Summer," a personal favorite of mine not to mention timely with Summer drawing to a close.
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Now with Audacity and the MySpace page open, click the "record button" on Audacity as shown below and then quickly press the "play button" on the End of Summer track. The track should begin to play and thereby be displayed as eloquent peaks and valleys of music in the Audacity track window.
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When the song is finished playing press the "stop button" on Audacity. This will of course stop the recording and allow us to go back and edit the song.
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The reason we need to edit the song is because there will be periods of silence in both the beginning and end of our recording. This silence is the delay in reaction time it took for us to both start and stop the process.
Using the scrollbar on the bottom of the track window, scroll back to the beginning of the recording as pictured below.
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Using the mouse place your cursor as close to the beginning of the song as possible, then click and drag it all the way to the left and release. We have just selected the silence in the front of the track, which we will now discard by pressing the "delete button" on your keyboard.
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Now we need to do the same thing for the end of the recording. To do so simply scroll to the end of the track and then select and delete the silence as you did with the beginning of the track. It's that easy.
Now we can go ahead and save the track but, first we will need to install a LAME MP3 encoding driver for Audacity to use and it's easiest if we do it here at this step of the process.
First download the driver, which you can do here. It's in ZIP file forma, so for those of you who are unfamiliar with what ZIP files are, there's a guide here at Zeropaid you can take a look at.
After it's downloaded and extracted we are going to put this driver into the location shown below, C:\WINDOWS\system, by simply dragging and dropping it.
Now going back to the Audacity program and our recording, we can now save it as an MP3 file with our new encoder.
From the "File" tab select "Export as MP3" as shown below.
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It will then prompt you to select a name to save it as, which in this case will be "End of Summer."
After clicking on the "Save" tab, it will then ask you to "locate the LAME MP3 encoder" we just installed.
Hopefully you remember where we just put it but, just in case I'll show you where to go.
Once this is done it'll begin to encode the track and turn it into an MP3, the music file type necessary to play on your iPod or whatever media player of choice.
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And with this ladies and gentleman the track is ready to go. 
Admittedly, configuring the Audacity program to perform as necessary initially takes a little while, but once this is done future recordings or "ripping" of audio files will be a breeze. If you haven't done so already please take a look at the twin brother of this guide, How to Download Videos From YouTube and MySpace. Hopefully you'll enjoy it as well.
**By the way, want to give a special thx to Sutton and the rest of those maniacs in The Wagon for being kind enough to let me use their stuff for this guide. You can check out more of their music, appearances, schwag, etc., at WagonMusic.com
RELATED NEWS AND "HOW TO" GUIDES:
SOULXTC: "walkin' the streets of P2P"
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top notch
http://www.wagonmusic.com/media/musicplayer/EndofSummer-80.mp3
the url was gotten from the page's activity in safari
One note to those using this method: if computer sounds are enabled (ie: mouse clicks, etc.) those will also be recorded. Disable computer sounds first through the Control Panel while recording.
Soulxtc, I think a title change of this guide would be appropriate. Your efforts are appreciated though.
I don't have the "wav out mix" as an option. I've got microphone, phone line, line in, CD/Video In, Aux/Line in 2, Stereo mix, and mono mix...But no wav out mix. Do I need to download that from somewhere? If so, could someone please tell me where?
The information was very, very helpful
Can´t click on the drop down menu at all, It´s all grey! So i really can´t choose the "Wave Out Mix" or any other applications. Have checked if i have the right version of the program and it looks that i have. (1.2.4b) have tried the most recent ones too, but no success..
Do i need some sort of plug-in or anything to make it "accessible*? (the drop down menu)
Secondly, recording an MP3 (or other compressed audio) over the internet and recording it gets you MP3 quality, even though you record to a wave file. Re-encoding to MP3 makes the quality even worse.
NOT the same as downloading the file.
if you want to do it for me:
pj_campkillyourself@hotmail.com
thanks
Hope that helps
just enter the band url, set the filter to audio and click get files!
this site also works for youtube videos and many other sites...
YouTube Robot allows you to search for videos using keywords or browse video by category, author, channel, language, tags, etc. When you find something noteworthy, you can preview the video right in YouTube Robot and then download it onto the hard disk drive. The speed, at which you will be downloading, is very high: up to 5 times faster than other software when you download a single file and up to 4 times faster when you download multiple files at a time.
Manual download is not the only option with YouTube Robot. You may as well schedule the download and conversion tasks to be executed automatically, even when you are not around. Downloading is followed by conversion to the format of your choice and uploading videos to a mobile device (if needed). For example, you can plug in iPod, select the video, go to bed, and when you wake up next morning, your iPod will be ready to play new YouTube videos.
Product page: http://www.youtuberobot.com
Direct download link: http://www.youtuberobot.com/download/utuberobot.exe
Company web-site: http://www.youtuberobot.com