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I can't recall any other software I've bought so quickly and so gladly.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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RadioLover software for Mac OS X records Internet radio streams


May 21, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   iTunes, the Mac OS X music software, is usually running all the time on my G4 Mac. It's great software, but I often found myself wishing Apple had added one more feature -- the ability to record the music from Internet radio broadcasts.
   iTunes can record MP3s or AAC files from CDs. Why not from radio broadcasts? Internet broadcasts, called streams, are far more varied than what you normally hear from over-the-airwaves radio stations. I often listen for hours to broadcast streams while I'm working. I can recall dozens of occasions when I wished I'd had a full recording of each show I listened to.
   But now I can do just that. I've started using a program called RadioLover that captures Internet radio streams and saves them as MP3 audio files. It can separate them into individual songs automatically -- an amazing feat, considering how much trouble it would be to separate them yourself after the fact -- and it can even record more than one stream at the same time.
   RadioLover comes from Bitcartel, at www.bitcartel.com/radiolover. It costs only $15.
   I downloaded the trial version, which records for only 30 minutes at a stretch, and sent in my payment for the full version exactly 31 minutes later. That's how impressed I was. I can't recall any other software I've bought so quickly and so gladly.
   RadioLover started out as Streamripper X, a program I tried and found too difficult to use a few months back. The revived version is a model of modern programming, requiring almost no documentation. Apple's own software engineers should study (and, of course, use!) RadioLover as a sterling example of how to do things right.
   And RadioLover scores at the top in another area, too. Instead of having bells and whistles -- things that impress you at first and then prove pointless -- the program has an added function you might consider essential: It can work just like your VCR, recording radio streams on schedule. For example, if you know that KPIG, one of the Net's best radio stations, has a show you love to listen to every Thursday evening, you can set up RadioLover to turn itself on and record the show every week. (It's vastly easier than programming your VCR, so maybe the folks who design video recorders should take a look at RadioLover, too.)
   If you can find a radio stream in iTunes, you can record it using RadioLover. It's that simple. Recordings are saved in your Music folder by default, but you can change this if you want. All the recordings I made were automatically stored as medium-quality MP3 files, and they sounded pretty much the same as the original broadcasts. This no doubt means Internet radio isn't a hi-fi medium, but I do wish RadioLover gave me a choice of quality settings.
   This is almost the perfect program. It does what it's supposed to do and then some. It's easy to use. It's almost free. And it runs under the world's best desktop operating system. You couldn't ask for more.