Then after a few months of conversations we managed to get our paws on some software called replay radio for review. Its claim is quite bold, in essence it is a converter from live streaming radio to MP3 files to be pushed to your Ipod. Could this be the way for the streaming service to attract the download audience?

Loading relay radio onto your PC is easy enough and is a simple and speedy process. At present its a Windows 98/ME/2000/XP programme and is fairly light on processor and RAM but it does need a ADSL connection of at least 256k to be reliable.

The first time you run the programme it will ask you to set locations for recorded media, if you intend to use iTunes, Winamp or for that matter any popular MP3 software to replay the files you might want to record straight into your main music directory. At this point you also set some recording settings and tell the application where you get your internet connection from and if it is behind a proxy of any kind.

Having done this its time to fire up the console for the first time, the blue and white interface is a simple affair and has a row of radio buttons along the left hand edge which allows access to all the common tasks. We started by setting a recording using the add record button, there are 3 main ways to "tune into" the station you can browse by station e.g. Virgin or Show e.g. Radio 1 breakfast show or tune manually.

The first two options will bring up lists of stations and shows that replay radio knows about, this can be updated for the latest list, however we did note a distinctly American bias to the show list but this is hardly surprising as the company (Applian technologies) is based there.

That said we found plenty of UK online stations and quickly set up a number of recordings, it is worth noting that only one station can be recorded at a time and if the replay radio codec is already scheduled you'll get a message telling you where the clash occurs.

Using the add a show selection we managed to record the 1Xtra presents show overnight from BBC Radio 1 however this is not a Sky plus box and this "shows" list is not an EPG more of a VHS machines recording feature. We do feel that a fully featured EPG would make this a killer application and the current scheduling method while effective is not that user friendly.

Once your shows timings are selected (you can have re occurring items as well as one offs) you can select the quality of MP3 file you require, while we naturally gravitated towards the best quality option which is rather misleadingly titled CD quality a simple calculation shows that 56mb per hour is actually 128kbit MP3 not CD quality.

To be fair anything more than 128kbits is wasted as most radio stations stream at far less than this, so its almost worth a test record from that source to see what rate they stream at and then matching the record quality, Replay Radio could help that process by quoting kbits per second as that is the streaming currency not megabytes.

That aside there are some nice touches allowing you to chop up the recording based upon periods of silence, this worked well on some stations in our tests "Heart FM" for one, plus you can burn CD's direct from the console.

Our main test was to push the MP3 files to our Ipod for replay, this worked well and both iTunes and Winamp can see and work with the replay radio files, once on the device they played fine although the low bit rate of Virgins streaming service didn't make for great quality. Perhaps our biggest gripe was the audio levels recorded by the Replay Radio software each station seems to have hugely varying levels which can lead to a rapid dash for the Ipod audio controls.

For now we'd suggest using the iTunes ability to level tracks volume while pushing to the device but we'd like to see some form of gain control either in the recording stage of the Replay radio software or on the file output.

On the positive side we did find the software highly reliable with it making recordings overnight and while unattended and Replay Radio certainly keeps its promise to convert streaming radio to MP3, perhaps with more user feedback the application will evolve to add AGC and even an EPG like feature although we guess this would depend on the Radio Stations too.

Replay Radio is distributed by Xtramedia in the UK with a SRP of £19,99 and a free trail of version 5.3 can be downloaded from xtramediasoft.com.

Published - 17/04/2005

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