It didn't take long for the rippers to find me once I took my live stream away from Live 365!!!

Thanks to all in this thread, i now have a simple banripper.pal running, two went away within a few minutes and I kicked the other one off.

What is BASS anyway?, I discovered some of the others etc.?

Wonder when those rippers will pop out of the woodwork on the AAC+ streams....

most rippers are format agnostic.

What works for your mp3 stream will work for AAC+ and NSV.

Anti-Stream Ripping methods are going to cause a big problem for LoudCity and any other reporting services. If the meta data changes, then that will make our reporter, as well as other similar services, think the song has changed.

We'll find a way to work with, just another challenge.

Not much else you can do though, this is probably the best way to thwart a stream ripper.

I suppose we could come up with a way have all broadcasters push the pure meta data to us. Thats going to be a challenge with all the different station sutomation software options out there.

SAM does make this easy, but it is a hell of a time trying to talk a new SAM broadcaster through setting up file outputs and FTP. I've easily spent close to an hour with some people.

A broadcaster could set up a single listener shoutcast server for us to monitor and lock it down by IP..but this is extra work for the broadcaster.

ugh...stream rippers..we *love* you....

Brandon,

I use the loudcity.xml for the logging stats. That only changes on a song change. Is that the best way for SAM users?

(or should I be giving you my SC servers as well?)

Cheers, Gorby

Hi Gorby,

Yes, this is the best way for SAM users.

Can anyone tell me if sending the *same* metadata half way through a song also causes rippers to begin a new file?

Example: Start of song, metadata is artist - title. 2 Minutes into the song, metadata is re-sent with the same artist - title info. What would the ripper app do with that?

i would imaging that somewhere down the pipline it is ignored. Would have to test that though. Older versions of shoutcast used to send metadata all the time.

I guess it depends on how each stream ripper works. If they are tapping the audio server status page, like shoutcasts 7.html trick, for meta data on regular intervals then it probably would.

I coudl be dead wrong on this, but If the ripper were looking in the actual stream for the meta data, then it probably wouldn't work becuase the meta data is sent only at the start of each new song. I'm making this guess based on how metadata is streamed from shoutcast. Here is some code for a TCL based player. You can see how it read the metadata here:
http://wiki.tcl.tk/14032[/url]

IK was wrong..I think shoutcast sends metadata on regular intervals

http://www.smackfu.com/stuff/programming/shoutcast.html

@ HTTP_404_NOT_FOUND

I have begun using your pal for title changing, and its amazing

It shifts between the oneliner i have in title.txt, HOWEVER when it changes back to the original title of the track being played it skips the audio for a couple of milliseconds, giving an unpleasent click in the sound.

Is is possible in anyway to prevent this?

you can test the audio skip yourself right here

http://62.61.133.90:8000/listen.pls


Kind regards
Cosmodk

The script seems to give me a memory leak, since Ive started running the script I have had to reset my PC on several occations as SAm just grinds to a complete halt.
Any ideas how to fix this ?

You must turn off " Allow Script in Stream" at your Encoder & Streamserver Config to prevent this 'klick'
You'll find it at the "Converter" TAB

Try an you will be pleased

Just my two cents, but I have been running this script for about two weeks now and it has made a huge difference.

So much, that I have stopped running the PHP Agent banning script on a regular basis.

I have even started receiving e-mails from listeners using iTunes and Winamp saying they like the extra messages that scroll by, and seeing what artists are coming up soon.

Watching the Shoutcast logs, I see a ton of known stream ripper agents connect and then disconnect after they realize they are getting 30 second clips of tracks that aren't even named correctly in most cases.

Ed
Flashback Alternatives

What Fester has said is all valid and to think in the end we will probably have to calculate something like the following.
A function that calculates rand(1,100), then executes asc(rand(1,255)) or similar with a rand(1,2) and then 1 being 0-9 and 2 being a-Z, then a "-" and then another 1-100 random characters.
Never having any correct titles and make it alternate constantly then rely on the website for the correct song. The only way they could then win is to rely on the dB however then we will have to tweak the cross-fader and all of this to stop stream-rippers. It's funny there is no real way to stop the ripping programs because even if they stream continuously into one file they can always (if they can open it) cut it themselves. Just my two cents, I'll most likely resort to random characters then Festers idea of random track names otherwise people might get the wrong idea and think that the random track is really the name.