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 and expanding a free iPod music collection has thus far been a tedious task. This process would normally involve ripping CDs and converting tracks to MP3. Finally, meta data such as title and artist information would be added either manually or by going to an online source.
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.
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.
A new recording tool from Amphony called "iGetMusic" avoids the drawbacks of these traditional approaches by extracting tracks from free online radio services such as AOL Radio and Yahoo! Launchcast, which each offer hundreds of music genres. This application will run in the background and store each song that is being broadcast by these online music services into a directory of choice. Each track is properly tagged by iGetMusic with title, artist, album and genre information which allows organizing tracks in iTunes and other music organizers. The tracks saved by iGetMusic are full length, i.e. do not miss anything at the beginning or ending. Having properly tagged songs is important when trying to play songs from a particular artist or album.
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.
Another feature is the ability to automatically save album covers. These covers can be displayed in a media player such as Winamp or on an iPod. Further, a user can create a blacklist with the 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 and expanding a free iPod music collection has thus far been a tedious task. This process would normally involve ripping CDs and converting tracks to MP3. Finally, meta data such as title and artist information would be added either manually or by going to an online source.
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.
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.
A new recording tool from Amphony called "iGetMusic" avoids the drawbacks of these traditional approaches by extracting tracks from free online radio services such as AOL Radio and Yahoo! Launchcast, which each offer hundreds of music genres. This application will run in the background and store each song that is being broadcast by these online music services into a directory of choice. Each track is properly tagged by iGetMusic with title, artist, album and genre information which allows organizing tracks in iTunes and other music organizers. The tracks saved by iGetMusic are full length, i.e. do not miss anything at the beginning or ending. Having properly tagged songs is important when trying to play songs from a particular artist or album.
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.
Another feature is the ability to automatically save album covers. These covers can be displayed in a media player such as Winamp or on an iPod. Further, a user can create a blacklist with the 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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Find more details about getting free iPod music in addition to iGetMusic from Amphony's website.
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