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Listeners of the free online music services AOL Radio and Yahoo! Launchcast are now building and expanding their iPod music collection automatically by using a new recording tool called iGetMusic.

Traditionally building the music collection for an iPod 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.
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.

As an alternative, internet radio listeners have begun using various recording software such as StreamRipper to rip online radio stations and automatically build their music collection as a legal and time-saving alternative to MP3 downloads. However, the biggest problem with this method is that online radio stations are cross-fading between tracks and inserting station announcements which requires that each recorded track is missing a piece at the beginning and end. Internet radio rippers are mostly using the title information that is broadcast in order to determine the beginning and the end of individual tracks. In other words: when the title information changes, the ripper will cut the track. The problem is that online radio stations these days are deliberately varying the time when the title information changes in relation to the beginning of each track. As a result, to get decently cut tracks, users would have to manually edit each track that has been recorded and thus spend 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 easy 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 big plus compared to traditional internet radio rippers.

When using iGetMusic, a user would launch the application and then open up one or several browser tabs at the same time and tune into any channel of the supported radio services such as AOL Radio. iGetMusic is actually able to grab songs from several browsers running in parallel. In practice this means that the software can rip several thousand tracks in a single day. The recording speed is in practice only limited by the speed of the internet connection and the computer. iGetMusic will check which songs already exist in the music collection and not record duplicate of songs.

Another feature is the ability to store album covers. These covers can be displayed by a media player such as Winamp or on an iPod. In addition, iGetMusic will not record songs from artists which a user has put in a blacklist.

Since iGetMusic is able to produce a large number of tracks, storage capacity of the iPod becomes an important consideration. An iPod nano offers up to 16 GBytes of memory and can hold up to 4000 MP3s depending on the sound quality or bit rate. iGetMusic will produce the songs in the AAC Plus (M4A) format which in comparison to MP3 cuts the size of the tracks in half without sacrificing sound quality. Thus an iPod nano can store up to 8000 tracks created by iGetMusic depending whether or not album covers are stored as well. Since some older MP3 players do not yet offer AAC Plus support, iGetMusic recommend using a free 3rd party batch converter to convert the tracks to MP3.