Back in the 90s, teenagers would huddle next to their radio waiting for their favourite new track to play with their finger hovering over the record button on their cassette-deck. To create a mixtape, teens would then record from one tape-deck to another, putting their favourite radio-recorded tracks into the perfect order.
We’ve come a long way since the days of analogue tape decks, but the idea of recording radio streams and creating mixtapes is alive and well in the internet age. Products like Audials One lets you search and discover streams of music and podcasts from the web and download those tracks as MP3s, ready to be put into a digital playlist.
Searching for songs you know is great, but where Audials is particularly useful is more on the discovery side of things. By searching for an artist, Audials will display a list of tracks that can be easily received from YouTube, Dailymotion or the 100,000 monitored radio stations from around the world that play that music regularly. With subscription to streaming services such as Spotify, Audials can even record music at five times the speed. Unique for a Windows software up to now! The music universe Audials Music Zoom lets you even dive in a space made up of (music) stars and galaxies of genres to discover new bands and artists you’ll love. A new feature in the latest 2019 version called Music Bot even uses advanced AI algorithms to find you new music that matches your taste – recommending artists, albums, songs, and playlists.
You can also search by genre and location, so if you’ve just come back from holiday and found yourself missing that local station and small-town DJ, then this is a great way to get back to that sunshine soundtrack.
Audials is not just for music either – it also lets you record streams of video and talk-radio, with an export to audiobook feature that is a particular highlight for those that like to listen to dramas, comedy, and other longform audio content. Audials also supports video streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and others to save all your favorite movies and seasons of TV shows automatically. For film lovers, Audials 2019 now has an additional advantage: watching over 300 TV live streams from many countries for even more fun and recording contents with a single click.
We couldn’t cover a topic like this without touching on the legality and morality of recording audio and video streams for personal use. As with anything, the best bet is to check the rules in your own country, but in the EU the broad idea is that artists expect fair compensation for their work, and radio stations as well as streaming services pay license fees to stream the music they play/offer. Home-taping in the analogue sense remains legal, but whether that is true for digital copies, where each recording is a digitally perfect copy of the original is up for debate.
On the moral side of things, artists should be paid for their work, and so even if you are legally fine to record via software like Audials, if you love a musician then buy their album, see them live, and grab some merch.
Photograph by WDNetStudio