Streamripping, as you no doubt know, is how folk record Internet radio to their hard drives. There’s plenty of available software to do this. A quick search for ‘streaming audio recorder’ on SourceForge for example, has links to more than two thousand on-going projects, an idea of how popular it is. An open source project that doesn’t top this list, but perhaps ought to, is StreamRipper. That said, a quick scout on the home page and you could soon have that ‘lost in geekery‘ feeling coming on.

So lets say, you use Last.FM (superb web radio/music recommendation site from the U.K.) and you just want a simple way to record the odd song for off-line listening. You don’t want to faff about with Audacity neither (v.good open source soft). Well there’s a team from Danemark might just have what it is you is lookin’ for, sir.

TheLastRipper can save Last.fm streams to mp3’s, while downloading album cover, appending ID3v2 tags and organizing your music after Artist/Album/Track. TheLastRipper will also help you generate playlists from the data available from you Last.fm account.

Legal? Well, they sum that up on the FAQ with this statement:

That really depends in which part of the world you are living in. As for us, in Denmark, the law is that it is legal to record radio and/or TV, depending on the interpretation of the law.

Whatever. It’s all on the house, needless to say. There is more detail on the legal issue in the Google code page (wiki/LegalNotice).