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 a free iPod music collection has traditionally been a tedious task. Ripping tracks from a CD and converting the tracks to MP3s would be the most commonly used method. Title and artist meta data would then be added manually as the final step or by using a download service.
This traditional approach has changed more recently as more and more users are downloading tracks from online retailers such as iTunes or P2P networks. Aside from P2P downloads not always being legal, downloading individual tracks takes a significant amount of time. Having to manually enter track information, searching and then downloading individual tracks for hundreds or even thousand tracks will take a large amount of time. In addition, the record industry, plagued by ever falling sales, has flooded P2P networks with fakes in an attempt to slow illegal downloads.
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.
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.
After starting iGetMusic, a user will start one or several browser tabs and tune each tab into the desired music channel. iGetMusic is able to extract the songs from any number of browser tabs in parallel thus greatly increasing the recording speed. In practice, the maximum recording speed is only limited by the speed of the internet connection and the speed of the computer. This means that several thousand tracks can be created in a single day. iGetMusic will recognize which songs already exist and not record any duplicate 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.
Given the large amount of tracks that can be generated by iGetMusic, storage capacity of an iPod is a limiting factor. An iPod nano, for example, will store up to 16 GBytes of data. That will theoretically will hold up to 4000 MP3s depending on the audio quality or bit rate. To help increase the amount of songs that can be stored on an iPod, iGetMusic uses the new AAC Plus (M4A) audio format which cuts the size of each track in half without sacrificing sound quality compared to the MP3 format. This means that an iPod nano can hold up to 8000 tracks generated by iGetMusic. The drawback is that some older MP3 players do not yet support AAC Plus files. As a remedy for these players, iGetMusic allows batch conversion of the tracks into MP3s using a 3rd party converter.
Building a free iPod music collection has traditionally been a tedious task. Ripping tracks from a CD and converting the tracks to MP3s would be the most commonly used method. Title and artist meta data would then be added manually as the final step or by using a download service.
This traditional approach has changed more recently as more and more users are downloading tracks from online retailers such as iTunes or P2P networks. Aside from P2P downloads not always being legal, downloading individual tracks takes a significant amount of time. Having to manually enter track information, searching and then downloading individual tracks for hundreds or even thousand tracks will take a large amount of time. In addition, the record industry, plagued by ever falling sales, has flooded P2P networks with fakes in an attempt to slow illegal downloads.
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.
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.
After starting iGetMusic, a user will start one or several browser tabs and tune each tab into the desired music channel. iGetMusic is able to extract the songs from any number of browser tabs in parallel thus greatly increasing the recording speed. In practice, the maximum recording speed is only limited by the speed of the internet connection and the speed of the computer. This means that several thousand tracks can be created in a single day. iGetMusic will recognize which songs already exist and not record any duplicate 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.
Given the large amount of tracks that can be generated by iGetMusic, storage capacity of an iPod is a limiting factor. An iPod nano, for example, will store up to 16 GBytes of data. That will theoretically will hold up to 4000 MP3s depending on the audio quality or bit rate. To help increase the amount of songs that can be stored on an iPod, iGetMusic uses the new AAC Plus (M4A) audio format which cuts the size of each track in half without sacrificing sound quality compared to the MP3 format. This means that an iPod nano can hold up to 8000 tracks generated by iGetMusic. The drawback is that some older MP3 players do not yet support AAC Plus files. As a remedy for these players, iGetMusic allows batch conversion of the tracks into MP3s using a 3rd party converter.
About the Author:
Find additional information about finding free iPod music as well as iGetMusic from Amphony's website.
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