January 2008, downloadmix.de, Radiotracker,
Excerpts and quotes from the article:
"Recording until your hard drive splits at the
seams
Any music lover today who enters music exchange forums to
download illegal copies of music is in violation of international copyright laws
and risks punishment by stiff fines. A much more prudent (and legal) approach is
to record music from an official Internet radio broadcaster. Here the money
trail works much in the same way as in the traditional scenario where analog
radio broadcasters are recorded onto magnetic cassette tape – both radio
broadcasters and empty-cassette purchasers pay GEMA fees.
Radiotracker is the ideal tool for receiving over 16,000
Web radio stations on your personal computer. All you need is an active Internet
connection. Using the application's blue-black user interface, the user can
select one of 77 music genres. The software offers not only the standard mix of
current chart hits, it also provides access to genres like Blues, Folk, Cajun,
Country, Trance and Classical. After selecting a genre, clicking on the Start
Autorip button is all that's necessary. The program immediately selects five
broadcasters for the selected genre, builds a connection to them and starts
recording the songs being broadcasted. The recordings are saved as MP3 files on
the hard drive.
The number of stations that can be simultaneously received
is of course dependent on the available bandwidth of the Internet connection.
The more bandwidth, the more songs that can be simultaneously recorded. And if
you can't hear anything during the recording process, it's no cause for panic.
Radiotracker supports silent background recording. If you want to listen in, the
Play function will let you tune in to any broadcaster you've previously
configured in the station overview.
Behind the scenes, Radiotracker offers many extras. It
offers an ID3-tag editor, displays lyrics, creates mobile-phone ringtones,
downloads CD-cover images, burns CDs and synchronizes music with MP3 players.
Especially clever is the ability to use the existing music collection as a
filter for preventing the downloading of music that's already on the hard drive.
The software is also able to function as a music search engine, targeting songs
on a wish list and recording them from the online radio stations most likely to
be playing them. A podcast player with an ultra-current podcast directory rounds
out the software's functionality.
A free test version (49 MB) allows you to get to know the
software in detail and record a limited number of songs. The full version from
RapidSolution Software AG starts at €29,90."
