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.
![rip-thelastripper](https://jonasfj.dk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/rip-thelastripper.png)
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 🙂
TheLastRipper was a nice tool for ripping some tunes from last.fm. THX for your coding.
A die-hard user of TheLastRipper.
“Welcome to the party, pal.”
Comment by MagicMichael — December 13, 2012 @ 4:45 pm
The last ripper was a great tool and it made people happy around the world.
Comment by Erich — December 31, 2012 @ 3:41 pm
I always liked to run it for a few hours to fill up my mp3 player before trips, since I won’t have net access on the road.
LastRipper has been very handy for me and I appreciated it. Thanks for sharing your work with the world.
Comment by Greg — January 2, 2013 @ 3:50 pm
It’s been really handy, thank you for creating this. I used it the same way as Greg mentioned, it has really helped me find some great new artists and music.
Comment by pedro — February 10, 2013 @ 5:41 pm
Thanks for the work you did, Its a shame to see it go.
Comment by dom — May 12, 2013 @ 6:36 pm
Thanks for the time, I could use this great tool. I found lot of new artists und interesting new music.
Comment by Dietmar — June 13, 2013 @ 11:34 am
[…] because of changes made to the radio API of Last.fm. The developer has declared the project dead officially as of December 2012 which means that you can't really use if for anything anymore as of […]
Pingback by Save Last.fm songs with The Last Ripper — July 15, 2013 @ 8:55 am
:O I need rip song fron last.fm, I can´t believe LastRipper is dead
Comment by Warbeast — July 25, 2015 @ 9:33 pm