While experienced users access websites like Shoutcast inexperienced users might like the idea of an all-in-one application that starts playing music instantly and makes the selection of music stations easier than ever. The music player will list more than 12000 Internet radio stations in its interface which can be listened to with the click of the mouse button. All stations are listed by name, country, genre and language with the option to sort by any of the parameters.

The search will probably be the function to find radio stations as it is faster and more convenient than scrolling through the massive list of stations. The developers should think about filters that allow users to narrow down the results in the list automatically.

The only other feature worth mentioning is the record button which can be used to record the current stream to the local computer. Recordings will automatically be split by track and an option exists to skip already recorded tracks. The functionality is however not as advanced as that of specialized tools like Streamripper or Stationripper.

A portable and installer version of Radiosure is available at the developer’s homepage. The program is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista and Windows XP

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Last.fm have now announced that they will start a subscription based service for a large part of their user base which will go live on March 30, 2009. Users not living in the countries United States, United Kingdom or Germany will have to pay a subscription fee of €3 per month if they want to continue listening to Last.fm radio. All other parts of the website remain freely accessible for anyone. Users not accessing from the three countries listed get a 30 track free trial before they cannot listen to the radio streams anymore unless they subscribe to the service. It is unclear if that 30 free track trial resets each month or if it is only available once. It should be made clear that this does not affect song previews or full tracks that are listed on the website.

Nothing will change as well for existing subscribers. The Last.fm blog post where the announcement got posted is full of criticism about the move. One of the main questions asked is why those three countries are exempt from the fee. The reason is ad revenue next to a strategic decision which are considered key markets. Advertisement simply pays less if a user from India, China or South Africa views it or interacts with it compared to users from the mentioned key markets.

It still remains unclear why Last.fm made the decision. Most users who expressed their opinion think that either the Recording Industry or CBS has something to do with it. If the Recording Industry was the culprit it is most likely because of licensing fees while CBS might want Last.fm to run profitable or at least even.

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The first step is to find an Internet radio station. The Shoutcast directory should provide something for every music taste on the planet. A simple click on Tune In should load the stream in AIMP2 if it is configured to play the playlist files of Internet radio. Since we have to configure one setting in the music player’s option anyway I show you how to make AIMP2 the default player for the playlist files first. Once that is done we are going to configure the options to save Internet radio in a proper format and select a directory on the hard drive.

Pressing [CTRL P] after starting AIMP2 will open the player’s options. Selecting the Associations entry under System will bring up the various compatible file types the player can play. If AIMP2 is your default player you can simple click on the Enable All button to associate all file types with AIMP2. The important file type for Internet radio is .pls which you find at the bottom.

AIMP2 should now start playing the Internet radio whenever you click on a link that leads to an Internet radio playlist. Now head over to the Streaming menu under Player.

You have to pick a folder where the music from the Internet radio station will be saved in. A directory of the data will automatically be added in the root directory. The second option is about the format of the recorded music. The default is wave which takes up lots of space on the hard drive. A better option would be to select mp3 as the format. Either 192 or 256 Kbit should be good choices. Other choices are ogg or flac.

Now that the settings have been made it is time to start the recording. The recording option is only available in the main client and not in the minimal client. You can start the recording by clicking on Radio Cap on the left side of the player. A blinking text indicates that the player is recoding the music.

Users who would like to record more than one station at a time might want to take a look at Streamripper instead.

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This new regulation means the stations have to pay not 10-12% but as much as 125% of their income in royalties.
So if they don’t have some huge advertisers behind them (which will lead to a music station with a lot of advertisement, thus leading to the opposite they want to the station to be) they will not be able to continue their work and passion.
If you want to read more about this issue visit Save our internet radio which is made by the owners of Radio Paradise and is a good source for more information.

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The best feature of Harddisk Ogg is that it sits in the tray once configured and you can start the recording with a single mouse click and end it with another one. The quality of the recorded audio can be configured in detail including bitrate, mono or stereo recording and encoding quality.

Harddisk Ogg offers several normalization modes that amplify the input signal to a constant volume. You need to download and move the lame encoder into the folder of Harddisk Ogg to be able to record mp3 files directly.

I would like to explain why a tool like Harddisk Ogg might be useful now or in the near future. Several countries have already laws in place that make it illegal to copy music from Cd’s if the CD is copy protected. They still allow however to record the songs using audio devices and compare this to the recording of radio with audio tapes.

This is also great if you want to rip audio from music videos that you found on the internet or from youtube videos.

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Screamer Radio supports Shoutcast and Icecast Mp3 Streaming as well as WMA and AAC streaming. A big list of supported radio stations is available at the official screamer radio website. The preset tab holds a large list of radio stations which are directly accessible through screamer radio. Just choose a station and Screamer will automatically start the playback. Just hit REC if you want to start recording streams which will then be saved in the default location.

A great feature of Screamer Radio is that you can hit REC even in the middle of a song and it will still be saved completely if it was not the first song of that radio station. Screamer Radio uses a buffering technique to make this possible. Best of all it is free, does not use many system resources and can be run in system tray. The only feature that is missing is the ability to save more than one station at once.

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Phonostar has more than 2100 English stations in it database including such famous ones as digital imported radio. If your favorite stations are missing you can simply add them by clicking on On Air and selecting Add radio station or open stream url. Before you are ready to record songs you should enter the recording settings and change the default format from .wav to .mp3 to save space on your hard drive. Click on recording in the left pane and select mp3 as the file format.

Click on Options > Settings afterwards and check the Recording settings there as well. Change the default dir for the recordings if you do not have enough space on c:\ like I do. Everything can remain as is. To record simply click the red button in the left pane and the recording process starts.

I did not find a way (unfortunately) to change the way the recorded files are named. Some programs are able to save information like artist, song title and album when recording and it seems that Phonostar is not able to do that. This is clearly a disadvantage.

Phonostar is nevertheless a fine program that makes it easy for even inexperienced users to record songs of internet radio stations.

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They have decided to add advertisement to their service. According to Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad about 10% of the users are receiving a nine second advertisement once a day. This looks like testing the waters for me. If few users complain about the ads they might introduce this to all listeners and probably even increase the amount of ads that are displayed each day.

I personally think that it is not such a big problem if you compare it to terrestrial radio stations for instance. It could become one if they would decided to increase the advertisements. One should also consider that websites that offer such services have to generate money somehow to be able to pay the bills for servers, bandwidth and service.

A alternative would be finetune.com which can also be used to get new suggestions.

What is your opinion on the matter ?

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The search reveals many albums of the artist as well and you can either add selected songs to a playlist that you can create after you registered an account or listen to the songs for 30 seconds. Adding playlists is rather easy. You click on the + symbol in front of the songs and it is added automatically to your playlist. There is a limit of three songs per artist and you need to create a complete playlist of 45 tracks to be able to listen to it.

This is a severe limitation of course but it seems that they have to comply with some restrictions to be able to offer the service at all. If you have added at least songs from three artists you may click the I’m lazy button which adds suggested songs automatically to your playlist to fill it.

Once it is filled to the brim you may listen to it. Once a playlist has been created it becomes public and everyone may listen to it and write comments about it. Instead of creating your own playlists you may also listen to playlists created by other members or so called stations which are playlists created by the finetune team.

You may even add playlists into your blog or myspace, code is provided to do so. I personally like this even more than Pandora but that is more a matter of taste.

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Genres are displayed below the graph starting with rap which has a red color in the main window and ending with disco in a light green color. Clicking on a genre loads only songs of that genre. You may also remove certain genres from the overall map, so if you don’t like rap and latino you could remove them.

That is not all – you may define a time period which has the result that only songs of that period are displayed. The graph has a second display which is simply called dance. This graph has tempo + on the top, tempo – at the bottom, dance+ on the right and dance- on the left.

I was not able to find a way to stream the music through a media player, if you know if that is possible contact me. Songs are played in good but not brilliant quality. You could select HiFi but this would mean you would have to pay for the service. ($2 for 30 days at the moment).

I would be willing to pay this amount of money if they would offer a way to stream the music.

Update: I did play around with their website and found out that the songs that you see are connected with lines. The first song that you clicked on is the starting song. Once this one finishes all songs along the line are played one after the other which means that you do not have to click on a new song once the old one finished playing. Great feature. Still miss streaming support.

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[tags]mp3, ogg, wma, record radio, internet radio, live streams, streams[/tags]

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