In the late 70s, when the latest must-have was a cassette deck, and blank tapes started to come down in price, the music industry freaked out at the thought of people recording songs from the radio or - heaven forbid - each other's vinyl albums. Their brutally direct Home Taping Is Killing Music campaign was launched but no one really took any notice, and the Home Taping Is Skill In Music backlash meant that more bedroom tapes were made than ever before and new talent flourished.
From iTunes to the iPlayer, you might think that you don't need to record anything anymore. It's just out there, all the time, waiting to be Googled. But the hunter-gatherer instinct is alive and well.
The early days of "taping" audio from the web were much like the radio recording sessions of our youth. Systems like Total Recorder would sit on your desktop with a simple set of record, play and pause buttons, saving any audio that went through your system. This time last year, Applian Technologies went one stage further. Their Replay A/V has added stream capture (going straight to the heart of an online radio station and pulling the audio feed) and tackled what most people do with the music they record - share it with friends - by adding a simple button to send MP3 recordings via YouSendIt.
The ability to rip live radio streams has been around for years but it was only the arrival of the BBC's Listen Again that there was something really worth recording. As a result, a few enterprising individuals have written software purely for saving BBC radio streams, like Alion Systems' BBC Radio Ripper.
For the myriad of other live radio out there, possibly the best tool is ChiliRec, which came out last month. You select the stations you like and it does the rest: recording all of them, all the time, chopping up the tracks and saving them to playlists for listening to later.
YouTube has brought countless archive recordings back into the open, but they don't all stay online forever. Recording YouTube videos straight to your hard drive is quite straightforward, though, and the latest version of RealPlayer puts a little Download This Video box at the top of any clip. From there it takes just a few clicks to burn it to DVD or drag videos on to an iPod.
Orbit Downloader (version 2.7.1 has just been released) goes one stage further, popping up a Get It button when you listen to music on social network sites, allowing you to record music straight from MySpace, Bebo, IMEEM and Pandora.
This social aspect always was the essence of taping music. Only the most anally retentive collectors do it for themselves. Everyone else does it to spread the word about what they like, or to try and make a statement about themselves to others. Which means that perhaps the best new product for saving internet audio is also the simplest and most romantic: Suck UK's new Mix Tape USB Stick.
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