AOL Radio and Yahoo! Launchcast listeners are now building their iPod music collection for free thanks to iGetMusic, a new recording tool.
Traditionally building a free iPod music collection has been a tedious task. The most common method would be ripping tracks from a CD and then convert them to MP3s. As a final step, title and artist information would be added by hand 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.
Another method which does not require downloads is using internet radio rippers, such as StreamRipper, which will record tracks from online radio broadcasters. This method would appear to save a lot of time compared to downloads. However, the biggest problem with internet radio rippers is the cross-fading between tracks which makes creating cleanly cut tracks impossible for rippers. When splitting tracks, rippers rely on the title information which is broadcast along with the songs to determine where to split tracks. Online radio broadcasters, however, are deliberately varying the time when the title information changes in relation to the beginning of each track. As a result, a user will have to manually edit each track in order to get properly cut tracks. This will take a significant amount of time for a larger number of tracks.
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.
When using iGetMusic, a user would launch the application and then open up one or several browser tabs at the same time and tune into any channel of the supported radio services such as AOL Radio. iGetMusic is actually able to grab songs from several browsers running in parallel. In practice this means that the software can rip several thousand tracks in a single day. The recording speed is in practice only limited by the speed of the internet connection and the computer. iGetMusic will check which songs already exist in the music collection and not record duplicate of songs.
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.
Since iGetMusic is able to produce a large number of tracks, storage capacity of the iPod becomes an important consideration. An iPod nano offers up to 16 GBytes of memory and can hold up to 4000 MP3s depending on the sound quality or bit rate. iGetMusic will produce the songs in the AAC Plus (M4A) format which in comparison to MP3 cuts the size of the tracks in half without sacrificing sound quality. Thus an iPod nano can store up to 8000 tracks created by iGetMusic depending whether or not album covers are stored as well. Since some older MP3 players do not yet offer AAC Plus support, iGetMusic recommend using a free 3rd party batch converter to convert the tracks to MP3.
Traditionally building a free iPod music collection has been a tedious task. The most common method would be ripping tracks from a CD and then convert them to MP3s. As a final step, title and artist information would be added by hand 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.
Another method which does not require downloads is using internet radio rippers, such as StreamRipper, which will record tracks from online radio broadcasters. This method would appear to save a lot of time compared to downloads. However, the biggest problem with internet radio rippers is the cross-fading between tracks which makes creating cleanly cut tracks impossible for rippers. When splitting tracks, rippers rely on the title information which is broadcast along with the songs to determine where to split tracks. Online radio broadcasters, however, are deliberately varying the time when the title information changes in relation to the beginning of each track. As a result, a user will have to manually edit each track in order to get properly cut tracks. This will take a significant amount of time for a larger number of tracks.
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.
When using iGetMusic, a user would launch the application and then open up one or several browser tabs at the same time and tune into any channel of the supported radio services such as AOL Radio. iGetMusic is actually able to grab songs from several browsers running in parallel. In practice this means that the software can rip several thousand tracks in a single day. The recording speed is in practice only limited by the speed of the internet connection and the computer. iGetMusic will check which songs already exist in the music collection and not record duplicate of songs.
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.
Since iGetMusic is able to produce a large number of tracks, storage capacity of the iPod becomes an important consideration. An iPod nano offers up to 16 GBytes of memory and can hold up to 4000 MP3s depending on the sound quality or bit rate. iGetMusic will produce the songs in the AAC Plus (M4A) format which in comparison to MP3 cuts the size of the tracks in half without sacrificing sound quality. Thus an iPod nano can store up to 8000 tracks created by iGetMusic depending whether or not album covers are stored as well. Since some older MP3 players do not yet offer AAC Plus support, iGetMusic recommend using a free 3rd party batch converter to convert the tracks to MP3.
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Get additional information about finding free iPod music in addition to iGetMusic from Amphony's website.
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