Listeners of the free online music services AOL Radio and Yahoo! Launchcast are now building and expanding their iPods automatically by using a new recording tool called iGetMusic.
Building a free 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.
This traditional approach has changed more recently as more and more users are downloading tracks from online retailers such as iTunes or P2P networks. Aside from P2P downloads not always being legal, downloading individual tracks takes a significant amount of time. Having to manually enter track information, searching and then downloading individual tracks for hundreds or even thousand tracks will take a large amount of time. In addition, the record industry, plagued by ever falling sales, has flooded P2P networks with fakes in an attempt to slow illegal downloads.
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 iGetMusic is started, a user will open up one or several browser tabs and tune each browser to the desired music channel. Since multiple browser tabs can run in parallel, the speed of growing a music collection is limited only by the speed of the internet connection and the speed of the computer. As such iGetMusic can create several thousand tracks in a day without any user input. iGetMusic checks whether the current song already exists and will not record any duplicates.
As an added bonus, iGetMusic has a feature that automatically saves the album cover of each song which is pleasing to the eye when playing back songs on a computer with a media player such as Winamp or on an iPod. A user can set up a blacklist which contains names of artists that iGetMusic should not record.
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 3rd party tool.
Building a free 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.
This traditional approach has changed more recently as more and more users are downloading tracks from online retailers such as iTunes or P2P networks. Aside from P2P downloads not always being legal, downloading individual tracks takes a significant amount of time. Having to manually enter track information, searching and then downloading individual tracks for hundreds or even thousand tracks will take a large amount of time. In addition, the record industry, plagued by ever falling sales, has flooded P2P networks with fakes in an attempt to slow illegal downloads.
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 iGetMusic is started, a user will open up one or several browser tabs and tune each browser to the desired music channel. Since multiple browser tabs can run in parallel, the speed of growing a music collection is limited only by the speed of the internet connection and the speed of the computer. As such iGetMusic can create several thousand tracks in a day without any user input. iGetMusic checks whether the current song already exists and will not record any duplicates.
As an added bonus, iGetMusic has a feature that automatically saves the album cover of each song which is pleasing to the eye when playing back songs on a computer with a media player such as Winamp or on an iPod. A user can set up a blacklist which contains names of artists that iGetMusic should not record.
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 3rd party tool.
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Get further details about getting free iPod music in addition to iGetMusic from Amphony's website.
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