It's not that hard to set up Audacity to record the audio loopback input on your computer; https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_compu... is a way to do it on Windows, and if you're on Linux you probably already know how to do it so I don't need to explain it. (Which I wouldn't be able to do immediately without looking it up, as the last time I needed to do that it was on my wife's Windows computer).

I'll refrain from explaining the rest of the steps to commit what some people would consider to be copyright violation, though IMHO if you paid for the music you should have a right to download a DRM-free copy as long as you don't distribute it to others.

Though of course, that does factor into the "time expense" you mentioned. But it's something you only have to do once, and you don't have to do it for your whole library at the same time.

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brokenmachine 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sounds like piracy with extra steps and a worse end result.

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rmunn 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Certainly torrenting the same tracks you'd paid for through whatever no-downloads-allowed store, if you can find those tracks, would be fewer steps, and whoever put those up would likely have tagged them already. But if you have obscure tastes in music and nobody is offering those tracks in a torrent, Audacity can rescue you from vendor lock-in.

The legality of torrenting music tracks you've already paid for elsewhere, which would be breaking the letter of copyright law but not (IMHO) its spirit, I will leave to others to debate.

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thw_9a83c 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Based on the description, it seems like fair use. It's like transferring music from your own vinyl record to a tape. It's not up to other people to judge why someone prefers to listen to music from a reel-to-reel tape instead of a vinyl record. The same is true for streaming versus listening from WAV files.

	▲	xp84 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I think if you transcoded all the music you want from Apple Music so that you could just listen with an MP3 player or PC of your choosing instead of their software, if you continued paying the subscription fee indefinitely - would be pretty defensible, ethically upstanding, and let's be real, there is a 0.000000000% chance you'd ever get sued for doing that on your own. The hazards of course are that if someone were to do so and stop paying the subscription fee, they're in dubious moral territory, and if someone built a tool to "help" you do it automatically that person is going to be sued.

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xp84 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Re-recording and correctly tagging every song I've added to my "Library" in the past decade in realtime would cost me thousands in lost productivity though, and I'm likely in the bottom 20% in the metric of "percentage of my library added in 2015-2025." So I'm locked in by the sheer impracticality. Someone who actually keeps up with new music, I can't imagine how many hours they'd have to spend.