Just bought this software ($40) and installed it over the weekend.  Love it so far. www.radiotracker.com.  From what I have read this is a legal form of music capture.

 

It monitors internet radio stations of your choosing, records the music, cuts it into individual songs, gets the tags, normalizes, and saves it in a directory structure you specify.  Duplicates are filtered out as are songs that are clearly not songs (i.e. advertisement jingles).

 

I have mine configured to grab specific radio stations (can also go by genre) that are 160Kbps or more and limit it to use only 1Mb/sec of my bandwidth so the rest of the family doesn't get mad at me (at that rate it grabs 4-6 songs at once).  It is recording 5-7GB/day of music - not bad (that's about 1000 songs).

 

Downside: quality is whatever is broadcast and the beginning/ending of the songs occasionally are less than ideal (i.e. DJ trampling on the end of a song).

 

 

Bill

 

Edit: fixed bad speeling.

 

 

That is very interesting. I have longed for such a feature in media players such as songbird. A lot of internet radio stations broadcast 128Kbps or higher MP3 files with tags and all: it's about time someone made a program to save the files.

From what I have read this is a legal form of music capture.

I'm sure the RIAA would say otherwise, I would love to know where you read it.

Still it's an interesting piece of software I may explore.

I was going to say the same thing initially, but reading on their main page says otherwise.

 

Radiotracker in the US

 

"This software enables you build a gigantic library of legally acquired music on the cheap", MaximumPC

 

 

 

Radiotracker records MP3 music from web radio station as legal private copy. Do not exchange MP3 files. Be fair and support the artists. Purchase the complete album.

Correct.  I originally heard about this in MaximumPC and that mag is fairly good about pointing out when software is running afoul of the law.

 

 

Cheers,

Bill