August 2006, PC Magazin: Quotes and excerpts from the
article:
"Today’s musical landscape has become one medium
richer thanks to flat rate DSL: Internet radio. Numerous tools called “radio
rippers” now promise to heap masses of top hits onto your hard drive as a legal
alternative to music exchanges. We took a look at how this works in reality to
see if radio rippers are worth your money ... Thanks to flat rate DSL, it has
been quite some time since users had to worry about online connection time and
data transfer volume. Anyone who has tuned in to Internet radio will have
noticed that the latest Top 40 music is being played there
...
No-cost ripping
Recording MP3 radio has already been possible for more than
five years. All you need is the Winamp multimedia player and the StreamRipper
plug-ins. Simply play a Shoutcast broadcast with Winamp, and you’re able to
record any song with a mouse click. The resulting songs are automatically cut
from one another wherever a change in the MP3 tags sent with the audio stream is
detected. Unfortunately these markers are not especially reliable. To
compensate, StreamRipper can additionally analyze the incoming audio material
using pre-defined parameters. But if you want it perfect, there’s no escaping a
bit of manual editing ...
Commercial offerings on the
horizon
Commercial software companies naturally want their fair
share of the revenue generated by Internet radio’s increasing success. Many have
released music rippers that automatically record thousands of songs from
Internet radio stations. Some even offer the ability to record from multiple
stations in parallel ...
Comment from Joerg Knitter, Editor at PC Magazin
... Radiotracker 2 Platinum's ability to automatically
download album cover artwork and lyrics for each song make it a notable entry
among standard ripping solutions. Its selective ripping concept is also quite
clever."
