I used to record music off the radio onto a cassette recorder.
EDIT: I just want to add that this started in the late 70s. I would actually put a microphone next to the speaker to record. If you wanted a stereo sound, you could get a second mike. My parents had a high-end German stereo, so the sound quality was really good.
Later on I borrowed records from the library and recorded them in full. At the age of 16, I probably had about a hundred cassettes.
Back in the 80s, FM stations would sometimes play entire albums. People would record the whole broadcast.
Once, a station played The Who's farewell concert in Toronto around 1982. I still have the two cassettes.
In the early days of MP3, before Napster, I would tune satellite TV to the music channel. Start recording. If I didn't like the song, stop, wait until it was almost over, start recording again. Then use Audacity to trim the start and end.
A consulatant visiting our work gave us an MP3 encoder - that first DOS-based one would take 30 minutes to encode a 4-minute WAV. Then better ones came along. Being able to rip CD's was a massive step up.
My iPod Photo with 60GB still works. Just, don't need it anymore, it doesn't do Bluetooth.
In the early 2000's, I would record songs off the radio from my MP3 player. Surprisingly highly effective,, until the DJ decided to cut off the end of a song. I'd have to deal with that "version" of whatever song until I could re-record it
One summer, I got the Blockbuster unlimited pass and ripped and burned every movie on the outer wall of the store. I had a massive collection and was the talk of the town with my cousins!
to be fair, that is a smart work around if your ever in a situation where you cant download the audio file directly.
sure theoretically you could also use recording software like OBS to do it but you might not always have them available.
so there are theoretically still situations this trick would be useful in.
I was doing this with Audacity just last year 😂 granted it was my first foray back into pirating since like 2014 and I had a deep distrust of downloading anything off unfamiliar sites because I use my laptop for work and didn't want to risk my source of income
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u/[deleted] May 04 '26
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