Streamripper is a open source (GPL) program that connects to streaming MP3 servers and downloads the tracks to your hard drive.

Streamripper started as a way to separate tracks via shoutcast's title-streaming feature.

This has now been expanded into a much more generic feature where part of the program only try's to "hint" at where one track starts and other ends, then allowing a MP3 decoding engine to scan for a silent mark, which is used to find an exact track separation.

Streamripper is now part of the FreeBSD standard distribution, known to compile on many platforms such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, BeOS, OS/2, this is not surprising as portability was constant consideration during development.

With the emergence of file sharing protocols such as Napster, Gnutella and now Mojonation and Freenet the average internet user can download nearly any MP3 one wants in a matter of no time, but many times people don't know what they want. Streamripper allows you to download an entire station of music, many of these MP3 radio stations only play certain genre's so you can now download an entire collection of music, whatever you want.