Best Internet Radio Ripper Freeware
Posted on August 2, 2010 by Vic Richardson
Wouldn’t it be great if you could magically transfer your favorite tunes from the radio directly to your iPod or to an MP3 disc that you could play in your car deck? There are thousands of exciting internet radio stations out there, including many locally broadcast stations simulcasting on the web. Unlike over-the-air, they come in crystal clear over the internet.
After ten years with the MP3 format, there are numerous delivery methods to get MP3s and most depend on you spending money in iTunes or getting them illegally via bittorrents. However, it is legal through Fair Rights to copy your own music whether it is a CD that you own or a radio station that you listen to. You just can’t sell them or trade them. TiVo, for instance, is an example in the TV/movie genre of this method. Unfortunately, the big players such as Microsoft in their Windows Media Player and Apple with iTunes, are never going to give you the option of ripping Internet radio streams to their libraries. iTunes is #1 in music sales revenue, even exceeding Walmart, and they aren’t going to rock that boat. Therefore we must turn to independent software companies for ripper applications and that is what we will look at below:
Features that you need to look for:
1. It must be freeware or less than $20 with all features enabled.
2. It must be able to parse songs and metadata from the stream and create short useful file names as it saves the songs to your hard drive.
3. It must have a good built in internet radio directory but still be able to let you input your own station url’s.
4. It should remember your setup and have a favorites list.
5. It needs to be stable, run 24 hours a day without stopping and have less than 15% CPU usage on a modern Windows 7 PC.
HINT: Try CDBurnerXP to burn MP3’s to a music CD if you don’t want to use iTunes for that. Despite the (XP) name, it does work on Windows 7.
Here are the best six apps:
WinAmp Player with streamripper plug-in (owned by AOL) – It’s free, is a good music player for your media library, has a simple skinnable interface, plays Shoutcast radio or other urls, but has no recording built in without third party plug-in, and is my first choice in a player. You will have to navigate the installer carefully and read each install window and unclick boxes so it won’t install unwanted toolbars, etc.
Streamripper plugin for WinAmp 5 – It works great, generates clean file names but you must launch Winamp as administrator to get it to save files in Windows 7._______________________________________________________________
Quintessential Player – It’s free, has been downloaded 1.3 million times on CNET downloads which is a good testimony but only records successfully on Windows 7 if launched in administrator mode. It also generates nice file names.
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Stationripper – It’s free or $20 – the free version has a maximum recording of 25 songs before restarting, has a confusing library search (it seems to launch assorted internet radio website directories in a built in window), supports Last-FM, Pandora, Shoutcast, misc internet stations, uses the free streamripper engine, has a feature called SmartStationSniffer to auto record, saves cover art and records two stations at a time in the free version (600 stations, unlimited record times in $20 version).
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Hitrecorder – It’s $17 after a 7 day trial, wants to install Lame for CD rip and encode (not required for Internet radio playing and recording) and only has one long built-in station list. The design is the kitchen sink mentality of ripping cd’s, encoding to mp3, burning cd’s, burning usb sticks, load iPods direct, besides the desired radio stream ripping. It has a pretty nice looking interface.
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Screamer Radio – It’s free, latest version is 0.4.3 2008, has a simple, clean, small interface, has it’s own built-in play list but records as one big file with no parsing.
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Radio Sure – It’s free, has a nice simple interface, is a good player and records with no parsing (one big file). However it leaves itself in the Windows quicklaunch area after closing with no option to prevent it.
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What works on the MAC:
RadioLover – It has a 30 minute record limit in trial mode or $15 to buy it, integrates with iTunes, and has no internal station list but pulls from the iTunes radio list. Think of it as an unsanctioned third party extension to iTunes.
PandoraJam – It records 45 minutes at a time in trial mode or $15 to buy it. You also need a Pandora subscription ($3/mo) if recording exceed 40 hrs a month. Pandora has provided a wonderful service and I encourage everyone that listens to subscribe – I did.
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Other Good Non-ripping Players for Windows:
Open Pandora Player –It’s a player only and has a simple interface, much like the Pandora website.
Media Monkey Player – It is also free. It only does MP3 playback from your media folder and has an iTunes like interface. Once you collect songs, you will need somewhere to play and organize them such as iTunes, Media Monkey, Songbird or Windows Media Player.
Songbird Player –It’s free, has an iTunes like interface, has plug-ins such as BirdTunes (Euro radio stations – works), LastFM (need registration), Shoutcast (won’t play stations, no recording abilities). It’s also cross-platform for Windows, OS X and Linux.
Internet Radio Player – It has few features, is simple to operate, and not very pretty but works well. It’s a good choice for a minimalist footprint player.
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Who didn’t make the cut and why:
Radio Ripper – It’s free, uses the streamripper engine, the latest build is beta5 from 2006, needs the .net1.1.framework and is clunky to set up and run.
AudioStreamer - It costs $40 which is why it didn’t make the cut, does have a clean interface, the demo has a startup nag screen but it does have good song parsing and titling. I used it years ago on XP and it crashed every time overnight but that could have been the radio station booting me off, too, from recording for over 8 hours, continuously.
Online Radio Tuner – It is also $40, but the install still works after the 30 day trial limit only without album art, has an excellent preset list and a clean, simple, attractive interface. It did assign the wrong cover art for me during the trial period and the file save names were very long but configurable to smaller ones in preferences. This was going to be my #1 choice in rippers until I checked playback in WinAmp and it was noisy and distorted. I rechecked the same station on other rippers and they all worked fine. That was a deal breaker.
Nexus Radio (Egicsa) – It’s a free download but requires signing up for an online free account to activate, the interface is bloated and slow, won’t save rips to subfolders, saves the songs as one big unparsed file and stayed running as a Windows operating system process at 50% cpu usage after it shut off. I had to manually kill the process in Windows Task Manager to stop it.
(3aLab) iRadio – It costs EU19 but does have a trial download period and rips Shoutcast and Live365. However it would never connect to any station (Windows permission problem?, other software autoregistered with Windows when they installed), and it crashed on exit.
Crawler Radio – It’s free, has an intrusive install and tried to install many other things that I didn’t want, has a complicated interface and saved songs as one big stream with no parsing.
Easy Radio 1.4 – It crashes at launch in Windows 7.
Musicy – It’s free, at version .07, is actively being worked on in 2010 and currently crashes on launch. Check back in three months and see if it is a contender.
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Conclusion:
There is no single clean solution. You likely will need a separate ripper and player. iTunes will play and record to CD, all in one app. Expect weekly large file updates, though, to the iTunes app (hacks, countermeasures, hacks, countermeasures and so on…).
I didn’t mention the Zune Desktop player. It works best if you have a hardware Zune and a $16/month all you can eat subscription. Then it is a truly awesome and wonderful experience. Imagine that, turned into an Internet Radio ripper app!
I’m a veteran of iPod Classic, iPod Touch, Zune II, Slacker Radio, Sirius in the car, MP3 CD use in the car, weekly podcast on the desktop PC, Roku Soundbridge, Chumby, XM Radio and Logitech Boombox on the dining table. After all that I’m still searching for a better delivery system. Suggestions are welcome!
Written August 2, 2010 by Vic Richardson
