Radio Gaga review

Radio Gaga is an intriguing and legally questionable tool for recording songs from online radio stations, and then saving them to your iTunes music library.

It's almost a science fiction concept: Radio Gaga will listen to the radio for you, cleverly (and accurately) recording and tagging every song that's played on the stations you select. And that's stations, plural. Select as many as you have bandwidth for, and leave Radio Gaga to do the work.

When you return to it later, you'll have a selection of new music to choose from - pluck out the stuff that's of interest to you, and delete the rest. After our first 30 minutes of recording four different stations, we had a collection of 33 tracks totalling nearly 63MB. After removing ads and part-recordings, that made 20 songs to save as MP3 files.

The iTunes-like presentation makes Radio Gaga very easy to get to grips with. A sidebar displays various views of your music. 'Radios' lets you find and select stations, 'Tracks' shows what's been recorded, 'Schedules' is for setting up specific recordings in advance, and 'Recordings' is a view of what stations are being recorded currently. Further down the sidebar are smart views such as 'Most listened to stations', and a useful diary of all the songs recorded on individual days.

Filters can be added, restricting recordings to specific titles or artists. The scheduling option is also useful if you know the exact show or DJ you want to record. Neither of these will decrease the bandwidth needed, Gaga will still have to do the listening. Don't forget disk space either, Gaga could start eating up many gigabytes if you're not careful.

The Tracks view can be sorted in several ways, most usefully by track duration, bit rate and file size. It's easy to remove adverts, part-recorded songs, DJ speech and low-quality recordings. What's left can be selected and sent to iTunes with a single click.

That done, the results are spotty. Sound quality is clearly not going to be as good as anything ripped from CD, and will depend on the bit rate of the radio station you recorded. (Radio Gaga can sort stations by bit rate quality and you can set a minimum preferred quality level in the preferences.)

All exported songs are automatically put in a new iTunes playlist called 'Radio Gaga', and listening to this reminded us of making mix tapes for our friends back in the 1980s. Songs will often start a few seconds late, or finish a few seconds early. You'll sometimes hear a short snippet of advert as a song fades, which will then abruptly cut out. It's as if someone has made the compilation with their finger hovering over the cassette deck's pause button, like people used to record songs from the radio in the good old days. This is partly annoying, but for those of us of a certain age, rather endearing as well.

For those reasons, music purists might find Radio Gaga a little disappointing. However, if you accept these limitations as the price to pay for easy access to a wide variety of songs, it does exactly what it claims to and at a price that seems reasonable.