Audials AudialsOne4 review

A vast quantity of music and other audio programming is available on Internet radio, but sifting through it all can be daunting. It's tempting to stick to familiar favourites, such as the various BBC radio stations, which would be a shame given the wealth of available content. AudialsOne is a program which can record songs and programming off internet radio stations so you can listen to them later, but also includes features designed to help you discover new artists and content.

Once you've selected a genre, AudialsOne can record tracks from several radio stations belonging to that genre simultaneously. You can set the number of stations recorded but, disappointingly, you can't record more than one genre at a time. If you like a station, you can add it to your favourites so it's always recorded. If you dislike a station, it can be banned so it's never recorded again. Alternatively, you can just search for and record a particular station instead.

If your favoured internet radio station isn't listed, the program can attempt to intercept and record an audio stream from another program, such as your web browser or iTunes. AudialsOne isn't restricted to recording audio though – it will even record music videos from sources such as YouTube and podcasts. Recordings sometimes miss the very beginning or end of a track though.

If you're interested in particular artists, rather than genres, you can set up Wishlists of your favoured artists. The program will then monitor its exhaustive database of internet radio stations and automatically record tracks by those artists as they're played. Unlike genres, there's no limit to the number of Wishlists you can set up. The program's vast database of artists covers all the mainstream artists and composers you'd expect, but we couldn't find more obscure electronic DJs and folk singers.

Cleverly, the program will automatically attempt to fetch metadata, such as the artist and song name as well as album art and lyrics, for each recorded track. Since audio and video content on the internet is available in various formats, it will also attempt to automatically convert tracks into the format of your choice, such as AAC or MP4 (presuming you have the appropriate codecs installed). AudialsOne can be used as your main music playback program – tracks can be burnt to CD or copied to MP3 players. Alternatively, your recorded content can be exported to another program such as iTunes or Windows Media Player.

AudialsOne's major failing its garish and cluttered interface. By default, the program is split into two panes, one for recording content and the other for organising it, although either pane can be collapsed allowing the other to fill the screen. The barrage of buttons, icons and options, many of them poorly labelled, is especially confusing. We did get used to it after a lot of trial-and-error, but it's still a struggle to use.

AudialsOne is a very useful program for discovering new music. It's rather pricy at present, though, due to the terrible Euro exchange rate. Its poorly designed interface is frustrating to use too, so it's only really for dedicated music fans that are determined enough to put up with its flaws.