AOL Radio Now Makes Building An IPod Music Collection A Breeze.

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.

Traditionally building the music collection for an iPod 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.

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.

To simplify this task, internet radio rippers have become more widespread, such as StreamRipper as a legal alternative to P2P downloads. These programs help automate the process. However, the biggest problem with internet radio rippers is that they are unable to produce cleanly cut tracks since online broadcasters will cross-fade between individual tracks. Thus each song will miss a portion at the beginning or end to remove the cross-faded section. These rippers use the meta data broadcast by online radio stations to determine the beginning or end of each track in order to split tracks. Broadcasters, however, are deliberately varying the time when the meta data changes in relation to the beginning of each track. As a result, in order to get properly cut tracks, a user will manually have to process each track which will take a significant amount of time.

As an alternative, a new recording tool from Amphony called “iGetMusic” is able to extract music from free online radio services such as AOL Radio and Yahoo! Launchcast which each offer hundreds of different music genres. The application is running as a background process and will extract the music from one or several web browsers in parallel which are each tuned to an online radio service. Songs are saved by iGetMusic into any directory and are automatically tagged with song title, artist, album and genre meta data. Songs can be then imported into iTunes software and organized. The meta information allows easy access to a particular song, album or artist later on. The songs saved by iGetMusic are full length unlike songs created by internet radio rippers, i.e. do not miss the beginning or ending.

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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Gunter Fellbaum has been designing pro-audio software for over a decade. You can obtain additional information regarding the AOL Radio recording tool iGetMusic from Amphony's website.

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