Review: Radiolover
Dave’s current spurt of posting from Macworld has inspired me to post a couple of reviews that have been on the back burner for a while. First up is a great app from Bitcartel Software, entitled Radiolover. Basically you can think of it as a Tivo or DVR for streaming audio content.
While I subscribe to tons of podcasts there are still a few radio programs that I’d love to have on my iPod that haven’t gotten hip to podcasting. Radiolover fills that gap nicely. To start recording go to your favorite radio station’s website, copy the address of their streaming audio URL and enter that into Radiolover. Once you’ve entered the URL you are free to setup up a schedule of when you want to record that station and how it integrates with iTunes. The best part of the app is that once the recording is complete Radiolover automatically moves the file(s) over to iTunes and will set their name, genre and add them to a playlist of your choosing.
Personally I’ve been using the app for a few months now to record NPR shows that are not offered as podcasts yet. To do so I utilize the WBEZ Chicago’s streaming radio station as my local NPR station does not offer MP3 streaming. If you do run into a radio station that streams their content via Windows Media or Real Player instead of MP3, BitCartel makes another app, iRecordMusic for just that purpose. While iRecordMusic has many of the same features, in fact more features then Radiolover, I enjoy Radiolover’s simple clean interface for scheduling recordings.
Overall I give this app 4 out of 5 dog cows. My only complaint is that the program does not auto-launch when it needs to record. However, using iCal to schedule the recordings as well as Radiolover allows for seemless-timeshifting-audio-joy.
