Audio Streaming

AOL Radio and Yahoo! Launchcast listeners are now building their iPod music collection for free thanks to iGetMusic, a new recording tool.

Building and expanding an iPod music collection has traditionally been a tedious task. Ripping tracks from a CD and converting the tracks to MP3s would be the most commonly used method. Title and artist meta data would then be added manually as the final step or by using a download service.

More recently, an increasing number of songs is being downloaded from online vendors, such as iTunes as well as P2P networks, the latter not being legal in all cases. Nonetheless, downloading individual tracks or albums still remains a tedious task. Further, P2P networks are being flooded with fakes in an attempt to slow the fall of record sales by the record industry. Just imagine having to enter the search information and then selecting and downloading a track for hundreds or thousands of tracks.

As an alternative, internet radio listeners have begun using various recording software such as StreamRipper to rip online radio stations and automatically build their music collection as a legal and time-saving alternative to MP3 downloads. However, the biggest problem with this method is that online radio stations are cross-fading between tracks and inserting station announcements which requires that each recorded track is missing a piece at the beginning and end. Internet radio rippers are mostly using the title information that is broadcast in order to determine the beginning and the end of individual tracks. In other words: when the title information changes, the ripper will cut the track. The problem is that online radio stations these days are deliberately varying the time when the title information changes in relation to the beginning of each track. As a result, to get decently cut tracks, users would have to manually edit each track that has been recorded and thus spend a significant amount of time.

Recently Amphony, a company that makes audio and software products has released iGetMusic which is an application that will extract music from free online radio services such as AOL Radio and Yahoo! Launchcast. The program will run in the background and save each track that is broadcast by these online radio services into a directory of choice. These songs are automatically tagged with title, artist, album and genre information which will make organizing them later on in iTunes or other music organizer software a snap. Also, this allows easy playback of songs from a particular album or artist on an iPod. All the tracks ripped by iGetMusic are full-length, i.e. don’t miss anything at the beginning or end which is a big plus compared to traditional internet radio rippers.

After starting iGetMusic, a user will start one or several browser tabs and tune each tab into the desired music channel. iGetMusic is able to extract the songs from any number of browser tabs in parallel thus greatly increasing the recording speed. In practice, the maximum recording speed is only limited by the speed of the internet connection and the speed of the computer. This means that several thousand tracks can be created in a single day. iGetMusic will recognize which songs already exist and not record any duplicate songs.

Another feature is the ability to store album covers. These covers can be displayed by a media player such as Winamp or on an iPod. In addition, iGetMusic will not record songs from artists which a user has put in a blacklist.

One important consideration when using iGetMusic is storage capacity of an iPod due to the large number of tracks that iGetMusic will create. An iPod nano has a memory of up to 16 GBytes and can hold up to 4000 MP3s depending on the sound quality or bit rate. Instead of MP3, iGetMusic uses the AAC Plus (M4A) format which cuts the size of the song files in half without sacrificing sound quality compared to MP3s. Therefore an iPod nano can store up to 8000 tracks generated by iGetMusic (somewhat less if album covers are stored as well). Some MP3 players do not yet have AAC Plus support. In this case iGetMusic recommends batch conversion of the tracks using a free 3^rd party tool.