[TheForge] Re: cutting steel and Bloodrock

[TristerK at aol.com]

A stereo rca to stereo miniplug cable from radio shack ($6 - $7) will  let 
you plug your sound system's amp into the audio in on your computer, then  use 
an application like "Advanced MP3 WMA Recorder" (doanload a trial version,  pay 
the $20 if you get it working (there are lots of other applications that do  
this, this one worked for me)) to capture the incoming audio stream to an mp3  
(small) or WMA (huge but better quality) file. I've been doing this for a 
while  now and it really was very easy to set up and the process itself is just a 
 matter of typeing a file name, starting the record and hitting the record 
button  on the screen.The down side is that it happens in real time - you have 
to  play the record to record it, but there's really no way around that. The 
other  minor problem is that, unless you really want to work at the recording  
process (starting and stopping, typeing filenames) you end up with two files 
per  album, side one and side two. For myself, I just leave it this way - for 
friends  I have used an editing tool to chop them up into individual songs (I 
like Cool  Edit Pro, there are free audio editors out there).
This is easy and legal to do for yourself, but I expect that any business  
that got big enough to reap the benifits of scale (since it's a realtime process 
 you'd need to do many at once in order to charge a reasonable amount for the 
 service) would likely attract the attention of the RIAA and you'd need deep  
pockets and good lawyers to cope with that - not worth it in the long run 
from a  business standpoint.