Streamripper

Grabbing music with peer-to-peer software is both dangerous and tedious. It's dangerous because your download folder is shared across the network, which allows the copyright owner to collect evidence against you and file a lawsuit. It's tedious because companies are paid to flood the network with fake MP3s which are nothing but three minutes of noise or a lecture on piracy. The solution is streamripper.

Every radio station in the world is streaming their music over the Internet, and there's thousands of stations which only stream over the net. And these streams include information such as the artist, song title, and bit rate. Streamripper takes this information, records the song, and then creates a MP3 and lays it nice and neat on your hard drive. All you need to do is provide the URL for the stream. Get several instances of streamripper going, all ripping different radio stations, and when you get home from work you'll have 4GB of music, enough to fill a data DVD. I've got far more music now than I'll ever have time to listen to it all. As Robert Heinlein once said (about solar power), "It's raining soup, get a bucket!"