Not paying royalties for listening to a recording is, IMHO, a slightly lesser crime.

Ah, but Dragi, it isn't the listening that's the problem. It's the owning (and particularly the distributing) of the music without paying royalties that is the crime.

In principle it should be simple, but please do share your experience

Not having any mechanism that can even play vinyl LPs, much less turn them into MP3 files, I can only relate an experience that is marginally relevant. I have had excellent results pulling music from a VHS videotape, simply by running the audio outputs from my VCR (a fairly high-end Samsung unit) into the line-in of my PC's sound card, a 32-bit Sound Blaster Live. And Tony Fabris is doing an experiment for me to try and extract the audio from a DVD movie (I purchased on DVD the same movie that I took the audio from the VHS version just for this experiment) to see if there is any change or improvement in starting with a digital source instead of analog. This is apparently a lot more complicated than doing an analog extraction from the VHS tape -- it took him quite a while to find software that would read the digital audio from the DVD and write it to a .wav file, and apparently dealing with the sampling rates (48 kilo-somethings vs 44 kilo-somethings) is problematical. We'll keep you informed.

tanstaafl.



"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"