Back in high school I started TheLastRipper, an audio stream recorder for last.fm. The project started as product for a school project on copyright and issues with piracy. It spawn from the unavailability of non-DRM infested music services. Which at the time drove many teenagers to piracy. Whilst, you the morality of recording internet radio can be argued. All the research we did at the time, showed it to be perfectly legal. Nevertheless, I’m quite happy that I didn’t have to defend this assertion.

Anyways, I’m glad to see that the music industry didn’t sleep for ever. These days we have digital music stores and I’m quite happy to pay for DRM-free music, and as bonus I get to support the artists as well. So it can hardly comes as surprise that I haven’t used TheLastRipper for years. Nor have I contributed to the project or attended bug reports for years. In fact it has been years since the project saw any active development.

I do occasionally get an email or see a bug report from an die-hard user of TheLastRipper, and it’s in the wake of such an email I’ve decide write this post. Partly because more people will ask why it stopped working, and partly because I had a lot of fun with project and it deserves a final post here at the end. Personally, I’ve long thought the project dead, I know the Linux client have been, so I was surprised to that anybody actually noticed it when the Radio API was updated.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post TheLastRipper has died from being unmaintained while last.fm have updated their APIs. Honestly, I’m quite surprised last.fm have continued to support their old unofficial API for as long as they have. So this is by no means the result of last.fm taking action against TheLastRipper. Truth be told, I’m not even sad that it’s finally dead. The past many years, state of TheLastRipper have been quite embarrassing. The code base is ugly, buggy and completely unmaintainable.

Over the years, TheLastRipper have been downloaded more than 475.000 times, distributed with magazines (Computer Bild) and featured in countless blog posts from around the world. Which, considering that this started as a high school project is pretty good. It’s certainly been a great adventure and I’ve worked with a lot of people from around the world. So here at the of my last post on TheLastRipper, I’d like to say thanks to all the bug reporters, comment posters, testers, developers and people who hopefully also had fun participating in this project.

Oh, and to the few die-hard users out there, I’ll recommend that you buy your digital music from one of the many DRM-free music stores you can find 🙂

As I promised a few days ago I’m releasing the unofficial Last.fm documentation that I’ve been developing in cooperation with Tobias Brennecke (tburny) and Matt Brown (blueboxed), two other Last.fm users. This new protocol for last.fm is very interesting, it offers a small playlist instead of one long audio stream, this is nice since metadata is included in this playlist. The unofficial documentation is available from TheLastRipper wiki, here. All the operations should be possible to do with Firefox.

Anyone familiar with the old protocol (version 1.1) knows that Last.fm gave you an mp3 stream, and a place to go if you wanted to request the metadata associated with the music currently playing. This wasn’t very nice, because you had to guess when a new song started, I know that the last metadata response contained information about how long the song was, but you didn’t know exactly when the song was started. Alternatively it was possible to search the stream for mp3 headers, which gave you precise information about when a new song started. But that required some computing. The new protocol just returns an XSPF playlist with mp3s and metadata, now that is very nice.

A new release of TheLastRipper have been in the workings for a while and now it just about to be done. Among some of the new features are:

• Perfect clipping of songs
• ID3v2 tag
• Support for proxy settings
• Better threading
• International character support
• Many minor bugfixes

These features have been under development for a while and the Windows and Linux clients in SVN already have these features, they will be release as 1.1 very soon too. But last weekend me (Jonas) and Rene of TheLastRipper developer team, decided that it was time to get a beautiful port for OS X. So we started out with the 1.1 codebase from SVN and installed XCode, Mono and CSharpXcodePlugin on a Mac. Then we wrote one of those simple “hallo world” applications in Cocoa#, after becoming a little familiar with Interface Builder and Cocoa#, we started the development of a client using Cocoa#.

And even though the Cocoa# bindings aren’t complete, the weird behaviour of Interface Builder, minor bugs in Xcode and the fact that we wrote most of it during a hangover, the result compiles (sometimes), and works fine too. This version is now being released as TheLastRipper for Mac version 0.9 Beta, once it’s been tested a little more and the last details have been fixed it will be released as stable too.

Now a bit about Mac and Mono based development. First of I’d like to say that I’m not a Mac user and never have been, I’m a Linux user with years of Windows experience, now practiced in a virtual machine for legacy applications. Now getting CSharpXcodePlugin installed and doing the LetterCounter video tutorial is definitively a good start. But it’s difficult to find documentation for Cocoa#, I had to go with what I could get from the assembly cocoa-sharp.dll using Monodocer. The result was that we copied the cocoa-sharp.dll to Windows and added it as reference to a SharpDevelop project to enable intelliSense, since that was basicly all the documentation we could find. But once that was done, developing the actual code on Windows and the interface on OS X was actually pretty easy. Especially with TheLastRipper since all the logic is in a platform independent .dll, which means we only had to write a little clue code. Of course you need to get hang of how Cocoa and Interface Builder works, but once you’ve got that, it’s certainly possible to work with… Even though Mono on Mac isn’t as easy as it is on Windows or Linux.