The Windows Cheerleader

StreamRipper is an excellent open-source plugin for Winamp that allows you to record streaming mp3 directly to your hard drive. It’s very similar to recording songs off the radio onto audio cassette tapes, which is a technology that some younger readers my be unfamiliar with, but it worked well enough at the time.

StreamRipper has a very nice feature where it creates a “relay stream” that you can listen to. Instead of creating two separate streams (one for Winamp for you to listen to, and another for StreamRipper to record from), you can have StreamRipper create a “relay Stream”, which his cuts down on the required bandwidth and allows you to listen to the same stream that you are recording.

I’ve always had a problem getting StreamRipper to create the relay stream properly on Vista, and like everyone else, I was all too keen to blame Vista for Winamp’s inability to connect to the relay stream. However, it turns out that everything is working exactly as it should, and there is a very easy way to get a working relay stream in Vista…

Instead of connecting Winamp to http://localhost:8000, which is the default host and port for the relay, you have to use the local loopback IP address of your local machine instead. In other words, connect Winamp to http://127.0.0.1:8000 and it will work perfectly!

The reason for this, is that localhost under Vista resolves to an IPv6 address and not IPv4 address that previous versions of Windows used. StreamRipper only understands IPv4, and Winamp is apparently trying to connect to it using IPv6. By specifiying the local loopback IP address of your machine explicity, rather than referring to it by name, you are forcing the use of IPv4, which means everything works as it should.

Happy ripping!