Scrape and Tag Pandora MP3s with PandoraRip

Disclaimer
I’m the type of person that, if I like an artist, I buy their music, either in physical CD form or via services like iTunes. Personally, I think the RIAA needs to go take a long walk off a short pier, but I do believe in paying a fair fee to support the artists who produce the music. That being said, if you engage in “scraping”, “ripping”, or “caching” music from Pandora, or anywhere else, I strongly encourage you to purchase the music you save. Musicians should not suffer because of the RIAA’s greed, or anyone elses.

As I’ve written about in the past, I’m a big fan of the online radio service, Pandora. In fact, it would be a fair statement that roughly 60% of the music I listen to is through Pandora. The remaining 40% is MP3s I’ve purchased. Some of which are artists I discovered through Pandora’s unique service.

Shortly after discovering Pandora, I started questioning how they could stream media that had a noticeably better sound quality than other streaming media services. After doing a bit of digging on the ‘Net, I discovered that Pandora doesn’t stream the media to your PC, but instead caches the MP3 locally on your hard drive and plays it from there. This made perfect sense and explained why the sound quality of tracks was so much better with Pandora.

After discovering this, I started doing some searching on my hard drive in my Internet cache directories for files over 1MB. What I discovered was a collection of random alpha-numeric files with no extension. I renamed a couple of the files with a .mp3 extension and surprise surprise, they were a couple tracks I had just heard on Pandora a few minutes prior. Granted, these tracks were completely stripped of all ID3 tags, but sure enough, there they were.

Well, recently, Pandora quietly made some changes to how their service cached files to your drive. The files are still there, they’re just a bit harder to find. The easiest I could find was by going to about:cache in Firefox and looking for large files cached from Pandora. This worked pretty well, but was a real pain. Then, I stumbled across a rather interesting little utility, PandoraRip.

PandoraRip is a handy little utility that sits in your system tray actively monitors your internet connection for traffic from Pandora and collects the locally cached MP3s Pandora leaves on your hard drive. Beyond just collecting these files and copying them to a directory of your choice, they also read the data being presented by Pandora in your browser. PandoraRip uses this information to setup the appropriate folder and file naming and hierarchy (according to your preferences) then it adds the appropriate ID3 tags to the file. For those of us who believe in paying for music, this greatly reduces the amount of time needed to find the album we want to buy.

Putting ethics aside, this is a pretty interesting application and it has certainly helped me to make up my music wish list for the next year or so. To be fair, the application is a bit buggy to say the least and it doesn’t catch every song played on Pandora, but considering the price and what it does, I don’t think you’ll complain.

So, what kind of quality can you expect from these “rips”? 128kbps is what I’ve seen. Not CD quality, but good enough to wet your appetite until you can go buy the album. Still, it’s an interesting application that merits looking at regardless of which side of the ethical debate you stand on. Like other things I’ve written about, I cannot tell you what to do with the information I’m providing you, I’m just here reporting the facts as I’ve found them.

And now, for a quick walk-through of setting up PandoraRip.

The first thing you will need, after downloading PandoraRip is Firefox and the Flash Switcher extension for Firefox. The instructions for setting up those two applications are documented at the respective sites. I couldn’t explain that part any better than they do.

The following section outlines the basic steps of setting up PandoraRip both in text and images. The links in the following list point to screenshots of what the description is talking about.

1. Of course, you will want to read the Readme before you do anything. Then, use the following steps to help clarify any vague spots.
2. Start PandoraRip, obviously. Don’t be surprised if you get an error. Ignore it. Your computer won’t blow up.
3. Make sure you accept the End User License Agreement. If you don’t, I don’t think PandoraRip will work.
4. Select the Network Interface Card or modem that you want PandoraRip to monitor. It will simply display as an IP address. If you can’t get an IP address, troubleshoot network connectivity or firewall issues first.
5. Check the Grab Cached Tracks option. This will scan Firefox’s cache for tracks at startup.
6. Set the Output Folder by browsing for a location to save the tracks. By default, I believe PandoraRip uses the directory it is executing from. Side Note: Regardless of this setting, PandoraRip always recreates the PandoraRip folder somewhere else, but doesn’t save files to it. Just ignore the empty folder, it doesn’t hurt anything.
7. Select the File Layout to how you want PandoraRip to organize your tracks. I don’t remember for sure, but I believe this feature is broken. All tracks are saved in the format of Artist\Title.mp3 for me in spite of my settings.
8. Set the Popup Menu History if you so desire. The default is 10.
9. After configuring the settings, click Rock On, then close the program. Restart it, then click onDebug Log and verify that the program is functioning properly.

That’s all there is to it!

You have read my two cents. Now have your say!
Would you “rip” music from Pandora, even temporarily?
If you “rip” music from any source, do you eventually shell out the cash to pay for a legitimate copy?
Should Pandora switch to streaming music so that people cannot “scrape” MP3s from their hard drive?