Avanquest Radio Tracker

Downloading music from the Internet has proved to be a very contentious issue in the past and while Napster and Itunes are examples of how to do it legally, many programs are exploiting the legal loophole.

Radio Tracker scans for Internet radio stations that use the Shoutcast service and will then record music from any streams it can find.

Tracks are then encoded into mp3 format and placed in a music folder, complete with ID3 artist and track tags.

We quizzed publishers Avanquest on the legality of utilities such as Radio Tracker. They replied that as long as the recorded streams are stored purely for personal use, it's totally legal.

Depending on Internet connection speed, dozens of streams can be recorded simultaneously - we managed to get 15 streams all downloading at once.

The bit-rate of each recorded track depends on the bit-rate broadcast by the radio station - the highest we found was 192Kbits/sec.

In a few hours we accumulated more than 250 tracks, each of which being advert, jingle and DRM-free and ready to play on a PC or transfer to a portable media player.

Radio Tracker also normalises each track and adds a fade to the start and end of recordings.

You can manually limit the bandwidth used by Radio Tracker, as well as the maximum number of streams, the amount of data received and length of recording times. You can also remove the fading from tracks.

Bad points are that it only supports Shoutcast stations and you can't flick between station genres during recordings. Plus, many of the listed stations aren't able to be recorded from.

For £20, Radio Tracker is a cheap way of getting an unlimited supply of decent music onto your computer.

System requirements:
Pentium processor
Internet connection
Windows 2000/XP