Streamrippers

Streamrippers are programs written by hackers and pirates designed to automate the process of identifying and then recording music streams such as ours for the purposes of then burning the recordings onto CDs and selling them for gain. Or they connect to our stream and then restream for their own benefits. All this activity can use up our valuable (and paid for) server space potentially stopping genuine listeners from tuning in.

The recognised media players such as Winamp, Windows Media Player, Real Player, etc., have no recording facility.

To combat the streamrippers, our servers have provided a service that monitors all connections to our stream and automatically kicks off any of the known ripper programs. The current list (which is growing almost daily) of known ripper agents is:

• BASS
• Streamripper
• FreeAmp
• UnknownPlayer
• Pathfinder
• sr-POSIX
• andycadd1
• AmiNetRadio
• UPLAYER
• HiDownload
• jake
• JetAudio
• karrel
• TotalRecorder
• engelmann media radio listener
• cr

Another method to hamper the ripper's activities is to insert station idents into the actual songs as then they become worthless for resale. We will be introducing this to selected songs as unobtrusively as possible.

Our server can also identify the exact location and server of rippers and this information is relayed to us. We will send ONE warning email to each offender and if that doesn't work we will inform their service provider.

If you are using a ripper program purely to listen to our broadcast then we would ask you to switch to using one of the recognised media players mentioned above. If you still think you are being disconnected incorrectly then please get in touch.