Product Reviews

This is a radio-lover's dream. Rogue Amoeba's Radioshift makes it easy to listen to, record and manage thousands of Internet-based radio streams from around the world.

While a variety of media players provide access to radio streams, Radioshift democratises the way users find and listen to them. From its sleek home page, you can use a built-in search engine to find radio by the name of the station or the programme you're interested in. Radioshift also lets you browse by genre. These are broadly divided into news, music and sports, with a dozen subcategories each. Most rewarding is a World map view. Clicking a city in this view shows programmes from that area, which you can filter according to type. Once you've found a station or programme, you can store it as a favourite on the Home screen.

Radioshift makes listening simpler, too. A traditional drawback of streaming Internet radio is the disparate list of protocols and media players required. Radioshift doesn't remove the need for third-party playback engines, but it hides them from the listener, presenting a single interface for streaming and recording. Radioshift can even manage plug-in USB radios such as Griffin's Radio Shark.

Radioshift lets you record as well as listen to programmes. By clicking a station's icon, you can usually see its schedule.

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Select the programme you're interested in and a summary window lets you listen to it if the programme is airing, or subscribe to it, which records the programme and subsequent editions when they air. Subscriptions are grouped in the program window's left-hand pane, which makes them easy to manage.

Radioshift doesn't even have to be running to record, and can wake or restart your Mac to get a subscription. It can even grab multiple subscriptions simultaneously. You are a hostage to the accuracy of the listings database, however, which isn't always complete. One workaround is Radioshift's ability to edit the recording time of subscriptions, and the fact that you can subscribe to an entire radio station. You can edit this to record at a specific time rather than rely on a listing.

Radioshift leaves a comfort zone of a couple of minutes of audio either side of your programme, but you can tweak this. It also links to third-party audio-editing programs, so you can tidy up recordings.

When you select a subscribed programme in the left pane, Radioshift shows an iTunes-like list of completed recordings in the main window. Controls are basic, though, with just stop, pause and play - no fast forward or rewind.

Radioshift has other drawbacks. You can't record live radio, and while you can add recordings to an iTunes library, the program doesn't automate this - unlike Audio Hijack Pro, Rogue Amoeba's more complicated audio capture tool. We couldn't assign discrete recording settings to individual subscriptions either. Instead you choose a global, highly configurable recording setting. Perhaps most critically, Radioshift doesn't try to reconnect to a radio stream if the link is lost.

We expect at least some of these shortcomings to be addressed in future versions. But as it stands, Radioshift's simplicity far outweighs its drawbacks. Not perfect yet, but on the right wavelength.