Unlike television channels, radio stations have embraced the internet as an alternative way to connect with their listeners, and through their official pages they offer a live stream. Of course, there are restrictions when it comes to recording that content, but the application streamWriter reduces the process to a couple of clicks, as long as you set the exact stream address or your favorite radio is in its database.
Recording music from the radio is as old as the cassette. DJs tried to keep talking over the song or start singing the ending to ruin the recordings, and even though that drew an insult or two from us, we did it anyway.
I'm talking about a pre-Internet era where bitrate didn't matter and there was no personalization. Basically, we had to stand guard by the radio with a cassette ready and press Rec+Play when "that" song started.
The rest is history: the internet kicked the door down, music became an "on-demand" thing, and today's radios face brutal competition from YouTube and streaming in general. Now, it's important to recognize that the vast majority of radio stations offer their own "live" stream, and they do it for free. Let's say you want to record part of that stream, and your sound card drivers don't have passthrough options. What alternatives are there?
Recording radio stations
One of the most interesting is streamWriter, a program that automatically connects to the radio stream and starts dumping it to your hard drive. The built-in list in streamWriter has nearly 40,000 stations, which can be filtered by genre, audio quality, and type (AAC or MP3).
Another striking aspect of streamWriter is that it allows automatic recording of songs from your wishlist when they start playing on any radio. This also helps us learn what's most popular on the "airwaves".
streamWriter is free, offers Spanish language support in its interface, and has a portable mode that eliminates any local paths or dependencies. Its latest stable version was published last year, but it works perfectly and doesn't come with any weird "gift" in the background.
