ESP is a software program that combines both concepts. It makes use of the Shoutcast directory of Internet Radios that the user can listen to online. It provides the means to record the active stream right away. Other applications that handle this well are Streamripper, Musicy and several music players like AIMP2 or XMPlay.

ESP would not be special in this regard if it would not offer a more or less unique feature in addition to being able to record Internet Radio. The software can automatically search for music that has been publicly made available by the artist or the record company. The developers say that ESP looks only for music that has been uploaded by the artist to social networking websites. The software itself will not display the source of the music download which could be reason enough for cautious users to not use the feature. Tests revealed that it pulled songs from websites like MySpace.

ESP is available for most Windows operating systems including Windows 98, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

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The software will automatically search the Internet for information about the current song and display the album art and lyrics in two independent windows. It is possible to refine the search if the first hit did not display the correct items. It can happen that the lyrics are not the only information displayed as the software uses an auto parser to parse the contents.

This can be fixed easily however by simply removing the unnecessary information. Results can be saved so that only those information will be displayed the next time the song is being played on the computer system.

The program can also be configured to look in mp3 and playlists for album art and lyrics before searching the Internet for those information. There is naturally also a way to save the discovered album art and lyrics to the music to make it permanently available.

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Stefan (German blog) however discovered a very nice feature of Winamp that I also did not know about. It’s not the uber-feature that would drive me back to Winamp but it’s very handy. I’m talking about the Winamp Auto Tagger which can automatically tag selected music tracks by looking them up in Gracenote music database.

Some notes about the process: Winamp Lite users seem to only be able to tag one music track at a time which could mean lots of work if you want to tag many tracks. Just right-click a track and select View File Info from the menu. That opens a new window that is displaying the tags of the selected mp3 track and the Auto-Tag button at the lower right corner.

Users of Winamp Full can use the Send To entry from the right-click context menu to tag multiple music tracks at once.

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It is most likely that the buffer size is not large enough and therefor needs to be increased. This buffer pre-saves part of the stream which will be used when the connection speed drops. You should now that the connection is never a constant one but varies more or less depending on a handful of factors.

The buffer is therefor mainly used as a counterweight. Here are the ways to increase the buffer size in XMPlay and Winamp.

You right-click the main window of XMPlay and select Options and Stuff from the menu. The Miscellaneous menu has a entry called Internet Streaming, a slider with a default value of 8s. You might need to experiment a little bit with the settings but raising to 10 to 15 seconds should be more than enough normally.

Right-click the main Winamp window as well and select Options > Preferences from the menu. Select Output > Plugins in the menu and click on configure after choosing a plugin from the list. The default plugin is Nullsoft Directsound Output.

Click on the Buffering tab in the new window and adjust the settings. The default values are 2000ms Buffer Lenght, 500ms for Prebuffer and on Buffer-Ahead. Max values are 20000ms which is a lot. I would start by adding 1000ms and testing that setting. Add another 1000ms if the music is still skipping.

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Thus, all those Internet Radio saving applications like Raima Radio, Stationripper or Phonostar have not made it into the final round. I also did not want to use huge media clients such as Windows Media Player that would simply suck up to many resources. What I wanted was a lightweight music player with the capability of recording Internet Radio streams.

I did find it. XMPlay is the client that is lightweight and is able to record Internet Radio streams. XMPlay uses just 6.8 Megabytes of Ram when playing high-quality Internet Radio which is as lightweight as it can get.

The function to record Internet Radio is already implemented and can be accessed by simply right-clicking the stream url in the music player and selecting ‘Write to Disk’ from the menu. This saves the stream from that point on until you stop the recording.

It is possible to record the stream as one huge mp3 file or save individual tracks which is probably the better and organized way to record Internet Radio.

The only reason why I would choose another application would be if I wanted to schedule a recording or record more than one station at a time. Raima Radio would be the software of my choice if I wanted to do any of the above mentioned tasks.

Read More:

XMPlay
Raima Radio

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When a Buddie of mine enters Teamspeak I have to turn Internet Radio off to be able to communicate with him normally. I have found a way to do just that, turn off Internet Radio or any other music from my music player but leave the sound output levels of Windows as they are.

XMPlay does that. All that needs to be done is to set two global variables in XMPlay which can be done by right-clicking the music player and selecting Options % Stuff from the menu. Click on the shortcuts tab in the left window and add the new shortcuts that you like.

I did add two: Current Track – Stop and Current Track – Play / Pause. I used ALT CTRL M and ALT CTRL N repsectively and set both shortcuts to global. This is done by selecting the shortcut afterwards and checking the “Global’ setting.

It is now possible to start and stop any music played in XMPlay in every other application in Windows. Even in games like Team Fortress 2. Very handy if you ask me.

Read More:

XMPlay
Teamspeak

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I never quite understood why someone would use Winamp to play videos because this functionality was introduced into Winamp when several other great software video players like VLC, Mplayer or BSPlayer were already in existence. I therefor decided to compare the lite version of Winamp 5.5 against my favorite music player XMPlay.

The Winamp executable has a file size of roughly 2.2 Megabytes while XMPlay one of 340 Kilobytes. The XMPlay folder has a size of 1.9 Megabytes after installation while Winamp’s folder one of 6.6 Megabytes. The first noticeable difference can be found if you open both players without a song and take a look at the Windows task manager.

XMPlay uses roughly 550 Kilobytes of memory in idle state while Winamp lite uses 1.37 Megabytes. I decided to load a seven Megabyte mp3 file into both players. XMPlay was using 2.52 Megabytes afterwards while Winamp 5.5 lite was using 3.88 Megabytes. The difference between both players rose from roughly 800 Kilobyte in idle state to 1.3 Megabytes in idle state with a 7 Megabyte file in the playlist.

I pressed the play button in both players and switched back to the task manager. Winamp 5.5 lite was now using 6.24 Megabytes of memory while XMPlay was using 3.84. The difference rose to 2.4 Megabytes.

Last but not least I decided to see how both players would do when playing Internet radio streams. XMplay was using 3.53 Megabytes while playing a 128 Kbit stream while Winamp used 7.66 Megabytes.

The conclusion is that XMPlay has a far better memory management than Winamp. The real important state is of course when playing music files in the music player and this is where XMPlay really excels. This means, if you really want a “lite” player you should switch to XMPlay instead of Winamp 5.5 lite.

Read More:

XMPlay Homepage
Winamp 5.5 beta download

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It supports all major audio formats such as mp3 and ogg format, plays internet radio streams, supports playlists, compressed files, library functions, skins, plugins and a lot more. Did I mention that it is possible to save mp3 streams that are automatically named to your hard drive ?

The XMPlay support site lists 70 skins and more than 200 plugins that can be installed to enhance the music player even further. You do need to create the directories for skins and plugins though. They are subdirectories of the root directory named Skins and Plugins.

Just copy the files into those directories and restart XMPlay to enable them. Several plugins exist for playing audio formats that are not that common. You can enable flac, mp4 or aac support for instance using plugins.

Oh, I forgot to mention that it uses only 6 Megabytes of Ram when playing an Internet radio stream while Winamp uses more than 20 Megabytes (the smallest Winamp version that is).

XMPlay is by far the best mp3 player that I have been using. Goodbye Winamp..

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