Entries tagged as rip

No, lossless compression has nothing to do with liposuction as someone asked me just recently. Obviously this person was just being cheeky. Lossless compression is a process quite similar to what people who enjoy listening to digital music do when they encode their favorite songs into compressed format.

The difference lies in how much data is kept intact. When you encode a song from a compact disc into mp3 or Windows Media Audio (WMA) or AAC, about 90% of all the data from the original track is thrown away in order to compress the file down to a fraction of the original size. This is lossy compression.

Lossless compression on the other hand, compresses the original file size down to only about 60-75%. Quite bulky still as compared to the significantly pared down mp3's or WMA's. But nothing is thrown away. Yes, no data is lost. This is lossless compression. And if you'd like to store your original music in smaller files but without losing any of the original data, then this is the format for you.

The nice thing about streaming internet radio stations is that you'll hear a lot of music that you won't regularly hear on commercial radio stations. I enjoy listening to chill music and aside from a weekly syndicated radio show dedicated to this kind of music, there is no commercial radio station playing this form of music. Lucky for me, there are a lot of internet stations playing this.

The problem is when I'm in my car, I don't have access anymore to my favorite chill stations. So what I do is I download (or "grab" or "rip") the stream, save it on my hard disk and burn it onto a CD-ROM which I can play in my car's mp3 player.

If this sounds like something you'd like to try, let me share with you the steps and the free software (for Windows) that I use to transfer the internet radio stream into something I can enjoy whenever I'm mobile.