Recording Spotify to your DAW, can this get your account banned?
Does Spotify have a way to see if your computer is recording with your DAC's stereo mix? And if so, is there a way around it?
Spotify cannot tell if you record a song. So no, it won’t get you banned. But as others have said, OSes have built in piracy protection.
With that said, it’s a terrible way to pirate songs. You can find most anything on torrents. Grab yourself some nice flac rips and encode them to a nice AAC format. Spotify uses really shitty encodes, you’re not getting lossless through them.
Actually, they’re apparently about to finally launch a lossless product. And they’re going to charge you more for it, when Apple doesn’t. Bet that’ll be great for them.
fair enough. Its just for my personal use so i can have offline music that isn't through their app. Audacity has the loopback option in their software. So spotify can't see that in Audacity either? How does that get around the the Windows piracy protection?
I don't get why you'd settle for shitty quality music because it's "just personal." Your ears. Audacity isn't the only way to take songs from Spotify. But removing the DRM isn't possible, so you have to basically re-encode it and that means quality loss.
You can try: https://muconvert.com/how-to/remove-drm-from-spotify/ or just search for "remove DRM from Spotify". Plenty of options. But all involve a loopback and basic re-encode to strip the DRM. That means quality loss.
macOS has an app called Loopback that can basically allow you to intercept and route any audio and then capture it. The UI helps see what's possible. https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/
I don't know how they'd know unless they could read your computer's process list or something like that... And even then, how would they know if a process is recording or just receiving audio?
They could add an imperceptible audio watermark
But how would they detect that watermark being recorded by a complete separate process or hardware output?
Which might be good for detecting if somebody somewhat widely distributed a recorded copy, but not if it was just for personal use. Also, if the capture process creates loss there's a good chance it might degrade the watermark as well
Just lossy compress it slightly. Completely gone.
but that doesn't actually download from spotify
Use a Gmail account; they are quick to block users on the basis that it might be a "spam account".
I have been using ProtonMail for a while with their service. The moment you log out for a while or don't use the app often, the account becomes no longer accessible.
It's about data mining; they're greedy and corrupt!
Take a look at spytify works like a charm honnestly.
On Windows, there is a Secure Audio Path API to prevent interception of the audio signal. Not sure if macOS has something similar, though it can prevent screenshotting of DRMed video. On Linux, any such protection is probably impossible unless Spotify requires a kernel module.
Note that the audio quality on Spotify is not very high (256kbps .ogg, I think), so anything thus recorded is going to sound lossy, especially after you recompress it a second time.
Tidal-dl ftw
So I use windows, does this mean I'm good then? Or is this some setting I need to toggle on?
this would mean no, you're not good.
and you need to take their second bit of advice to heart! always shoot for higher bitrate files if you're learning to produce. manipulating lossy files will often sound nastier, so get FLACs/WAVs of the songs instead. with those two reasons + the fact that Spotify could possibly have unnoticeable watermarks while streaming even if it does work, I would strongly advise against getting your samples this way