Download Streaming Music Ripper [Windows 7/10/11]
Have you ever found a website that has some great music playing in the background, but you can't get it? Recently I found some rare songs that I want to download to my home computer to record an audio CD. Is it possible to rip music that I'm listening on the website? Found those hard to find song just to find out that you can only listen to it?
If you encounter a similar situation when you want to rip music from website, but do not know how to do it, you are in the right place. Here you will find several ways to copy music to your hard drive. Keep in mind that everything depends on the website and not all methods may work, and the results may vary greatly. Therefore, start with the first three methods, which do not require installing additional software.
1 Search for a music file in the web page source
Since HTML5 standard has become popular there is no need to use flash-player. The direct URL of the music file will be visible in the HTML code of the web page. Just righ-click in web browser and select "View source". Press "Ctrl+F" to open a search window and enter ".mp3". Found it? Download it!
As an aside, the HTML player itself usually has a standard option to download the file. This will work unless the site developer has blocked it. Give this method a try before moving on to other options.
2 Looking for music file in temporary internet files
If the website uses a special player to play music, then you will not find direct link to the audio file. Many players download music to your disk during buffering, so you can search for audio files in the temporary internet folder. If you clear your temporary internet folder before visiting the site, it will be easier to find.
3 Download via Browser Developer Tools
Modern web browsers have a ton of tools for website developers, like markup validation, script debugging, speed testing, and page load monitoring with all content. That last point is especially interesting to us. Let's look at it with the Chromium browser as an example. To access the context menu at any point in the loaded page, simply right-click. Then, select the "Inspect" item from the menu. In the top section, click on the "Network" tab and then press F5 to reload the page. Now, you can see how the page content is loaded in the waterfall view. If you haven't started playing music on the page yet, just press the button on the page that you need to play it. Do you see that a new line has appeared on the graph? If the size of the download graph is too large, you can narrow the search range by selecting the "Media" tab. Now you can see the active audio stream, and in the browser response header you can see its format. All that's left is to right-click on it and select "Save Response".
Alas, this method will not work well on streaming services because they encrypt audio streams.
4 Rip music using audio recorder
If you have reached this point then it means that you could not find the audio file. Well, it happens quite often with streaming audio. If you want to make your life easier, then there is another simple way. You can rip music from a website with a single click using music ripper. The main advantage of this method is absolute universality. The program is able to record music from any site in any format.
- Download and install music ripper.
- Open ripper settings and select output folder for music files
- Make sure that music ripper use the Speakers as recording source
- Select output format for music files, MP3, AAC, WAV or FLAC
- Open website with music and click the "Record" button
It's been almost 10 years since this article was first published, but this method is still the best. The recorder has since gained new features and automatically recognizes the artist, song title, and downloaded artwork.
5 Using browser extensions
I put this item last, despite the fact that it seems the easiest and most convenient. I will try to explain why. I don't like the fact that insecure code will have access to all the pages I visit, including banking and brokerage data. Other than that, there is no one-size-fits-all extension that supports all sites. This means that you will need a separate extension for each site. For me, that's overkill.