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.
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. But, the largest 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 part 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, but, 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.
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 simple 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 huge plus compared to traditional internet radio rippers.
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 make 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 vital consideration when using iGetMusic is storage capacity of an iPod due to the large number of tracks that iGetMusic will make. 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.
Find further details about finding free iPod music in addition to iGetMusic from Amphony’s website.
Tags: iPod, Music, software, MP3s