Radiotracker Premium review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 22 Feb 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: David Ludlow

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

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Review
Specs

Finding new music and building a large MP3 collection can be difficult, not to mention expensive.

With Radiotracker you can do both for the price of the software. It's designed to scan internet radio stations that broadcast in MP3 format and save the songs to your hard disk.

It doesn't download tracks blindly, though - you have some control over what makes it to your PC. You can select the genre of music you want, so you get only tracks you're likely to be interested in, and also specify a bit rate for MP3s to make sure you don't get any poor-quality files.

Click Start, and the software looks for new tracks and downloads them to your PC. You'll need a broadband internet connection, and you may want to limit downloads to times when you wouldn't normally use your connection, such as while you're at work or late at night, as Radiotracker takes up a lot of bandwidth. While it's working, the status window shows you which tracks it's downloading and from which radio stations. You can select a radio station and listen to it live if you want.

Not all the songs it downloads are saved to your PC, though. The default setting is to save only the 'best' songs, meaning those with the highest-quality bit rate and fewest number of errors. You can change these settings, which are quite complicated, or just opt to save every track. Sadly, Radiotracker doesn't provide a list of tracks it has saved, and you'll have to look through the export folder. This is set to My Music by default, but you can change it if you want.

We were very pleased with the results. All the tracks we downloaded had ID3 tags. Some ended prematurely or had the start of another song at the end, but relatively few did this.

Radiotracker is an excellent way of finding new songs, and it is great value.

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