Product Reviews

Radiotracker allows you to legally build your MP3 collection by recording songs from thousands of internet radio stations. As long as you don't share these songs with anyone else you're not breaking the law.

We're big fans of the previous versions of Radiotracker, and Platinum is better still. An Autorip function allows you to select a genre of music, or the top 25 genres, and sit back while your hard disk is filled with thousands of tracks. The wishlist is more useful as it allows you to specify particular artists, tracks or albums that you would

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like to record and even relatively obscure artists are included in Radiotracker's database.

You can limit the number of stations that can be recorded at once, in order to ensure that you still use your broadband connection for browsing and other downloads. It's also possible to pick your favourite stations from a list of around 18,000 or manually add your own. By default, only stations broadcasting at 128Kbit/s or higher are recorded, but you can alter this to your liking.

Radiotracker automatically populates ID3 tags; we found tags to be very accurate, and it's simple to edit incorrect ones. For the majority of tracks, album art is downloaded; occasionally lyrics are, too.

As DJs tend to talk over the beginning and end of tracks, Radiotracker detects this and fades tracks in and out. However, it means you end up with a shortened version - one of the limitations of the recording technique.

New with version 4 is a podcast database for your favourite audio or video podcasts. It's also possible to burn audio CDs. Finally, it can synchronise your music with an MP3 player, and for just £21 it's a great buy.