I had a free month on Sky Songs ( http://songs.sky.com/ ) which was cool as basic membership allows download of an album a month as much streaming as you want.

With something like audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) you can record all streamed audio. I used to use Total Recorder ( http://www.highcriteria.com/) for that kind of thing but since I trashed and re-installed my PC I thought I try something new. My Total Record subscription was so old it was only valid for an ancient version (which never had a good MP3 output, I used to output to WAV and then convert later). Total Recorder was good as it lifted the commands from the sound card, audacity seems to record from the output of the sound card with a loss of quality and the added burden of having to set the sound levels right.

I used audacity to record a couple of old Christmas LP’s from vinyl. Using the latest beta I was able to use plug-ins to find silences and split albums into tracks, the labels can be exported to a text file and simply edited to correct names via cut and paste. The only short coming here was I used my laptop which doesn’t appear to have a line in socket - I used the mic which is (unsurprisingly) mono.

Of course I am not condoning stealing of copyrighted music - I think I am entitled to take a copy of my own LP’s! Recording from sky songs (or WE 7 which is free if you can tolerate the adverts) would I guess be illegal. However, it is a similar procedure to recording “pick of the pops” onto cassette (or reel to reel tape in my youth) - with the great advantage of being able to request what is played, not just waiting for Alan Freeman to get round to playing it. I doubt recording streaming audio would appeal to today’s youth as it is a bit fiddley, takes too much time and the results are less than a digitally perfect copy. You have to record in real time after you have tried a few levels and then mark out tracks and export to MP3, maybe an hour an half for a CD. Hardly the easy download - although for a single track it would be easier.