tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-275375912024-03-08T00:02:55.883-08:00StationRipperThe StationRipper blog. StationRipper is a Windows application that records internet radio. It's been around since 2003, and had several million users. Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164873990624326167noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27537591.post-76679714299198546572013-12-12T23:25:00.000-08:002013-12-13T08:13:20.811-08:00Happy 10th Birthday, StationRipper!Well damn - I just realized that tomorrow is StationRipper's 10th anniversary! It was first<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StationRipper" target="_blank"> released on Dec 13, 2003</a>, and has been downloaded many millions of times. As it was originally just a toy for myself and a few friends to record internet radio, I'm fairly shocked that it's still getting a lot of daily downloads! <br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Everything else to record Internet Radio sucked back then - well, at least the main stand-alone GUI app - StreamRipper32... was hideous. It was based on streamripper, which was solid - but very limiting. The WinAmp plugin made it a bit nicer, but still had some limits (the biggest was only easily recording one stream at a time). Both would keep re-recording music, which got old - Users would record thousands of songs, prune what they didn't want - and the songs would just show back up again when re-recorded the same station. Fun.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So I figured I'd write my own - I was working on AnnotatedEarth at the time (consumer focused location aware tech - location aware before there were really any devices that supported what I wanted to do). I wrote StationRipper as a side thing, just 'cause I wanted something that worked better. Got it more or less working and handed it out to a few friends. They loved it, gave it to a few more people. Next thing I knew, my domain was suspended because of bandwidth overage. It just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger - was getting mirrored all over the place,was included with CD's in magazines, interview in the Boston Globe, on a few TV shows... within a couple of years it had gone over several million downloads.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Since 2003 I've put out 126 releases - several major revisions with a bunch of point releases. I wrote StationPortal.com, which tracks what stations are playing (and resulted in my having the<a href="https://twitter.com/internetradio" target="_blank"> most tweets of ALL users</a> - I've since fallen to the #5 spot for all tweets). While StationRipper originally just record shoutcast and podcasts, I expanded it to record Last.fm, then Pandora.com, then a bunch of other stuff (was shocked one night when I had it running and noticed it had started to record YouTube - <i>cool </i>when software surprised you like that!)<br />
<br />
I haven't been keeping up with it lately, and it shows. I joined Microsoft Research about three years ago, which... distracted me a bit. The app is written in C++/MFC 4.0 - I still have Visual Studio 6 installed just for build it (and yeah, VS will still build MFC, but there are some major static linker/size issues, so I stay with what I've got. On the up side, it will run on Windows 95 - and I still get the occasional user needing support for that!)<br />
<br />
I've been intended to re-write in something else for a long time now - but I enjoy doing new stuff (PhoneBomber being the lastest - massively multiplayer location aware gaming - a projet I dreamed up in 2003 when working on AnnotatedEarth, and finally wrote 4 years ago). <br />
<br />
I'm not sure if it's worth doing, though - I don't know if most people really WANT media anymore. I know I personally listen to Spotify all day - and yeah, if I wanted to I could get StationRipper recording Spotify - but WHY? I can play any song any time I want, wherever I'm at. I realize SOME people still want MP3 files, or I wouldn't be getting the number of downloads (and support questions) I'm still getting... just not sure how many are left :)<br />
<br />
Anyway - it's been a <b>GREAT </b>10 years - didn't get as big as napster (thank god), but it's still a kick to run into users that have loved the software over the years!<br />
<br />
Some videos: of the software running:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/Tf_Rgu9umSY" target="_blank">Easily record Pandora.com</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/9idS-P875j0" target="_blank">Record 5+ Songs every 12 hours</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/OWYLL_cFcMQ" target="_blank">StationRipper - Record lots and lots of music...</a><br />
<br />
(and yeah, you really can download a few thousand songs every few hours...)<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164873990624326167noreply@blogger.com0Bellevue, WA, USA47.616144497312 -122.1923875808715847.616144497312 -122.19238758087158 47.616144497312 -122.19238758087158tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27537591.post-16397382673126477562008-06-18T17:56:00.000-07:002008-06-18T18:11:32.065-07:00Few big changes tonight:<br /><br /><ul><li>Doing a 2 minute cache on the main page. This means votes and song info will be a bit dated (by 2 minutes), but means the main page will load MUCH faster.</li><li>Defaulting to "year" on main page. I rather do recent, but there needs to be a freshness factor to it, which I have not yet done (and need to get more VOTING!)</li><li>The recent vote list will now always display the last 10</li><li>BIG problem with images. We had been caching the amazon images, but for too long - so we will now stay current (Amazon changed the URL's to images, so what we had cached was no longer valid and returned a 0 byte image). This will take a bit to refresh - if the image info is too old it will refresh.</li></ul>The social part has been going ok, and we're pretty happy with the new site. Just need to get more users using the social aspect of it!<br /><br />The Record Pandora part is out, and working well.Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164873990624326167noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27537591.post-54136971693831021282008-01-11T12:27:00.001-08:002008-01-11T12:27:38.019-08:00I've started work on the new version of StationPortal.com - should be interesting, as it adds a social element.Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164873990624326167noreply@blogger.com0