It depends on whether the radio station sends song information in the broadcast. If there is no song information you can still record the radio station and split recordings by time or size, to make it easier to navigate through long recordings. If there is song information, RadioLover can do a good job of splitting a stream whenever there is a new song.

There is a preference option to ignore recordings of a small size. Many adverts or jingles are a few seconds long and can therefore be filtered out. However, if there is cross-fading between songs, or an announcer speaks between tracks, it is not possible to remove the cross-fade or the voice-over. We do not know of any software which can do this.

RadioLover focuses on splitting and recording MP3 audio streams. To record other audio formats, please use iRecordMusic, also from Bitcartel Software. It is worth checking the radio broadcaster's web-site as many broadcasters have audio streams in a number of audio formats, including MP3.

In iTunes you will see an icon representing your iPod. You can drag'n'drop your music files and playlists onto this icon to transfer recordings.

This means that the radio station is not sending any track data. In the radio station's assigned recording style, the manual recording options, such as split by time, or split by size, will take effect. If you select the option to force manual recording, and avoid automatically splitting a stream into songs, the text "no tract data" will also appear.

In your download folder, under each radio station's folder, there is a folder called "incomplete". RadioLover records streams into this folder and does work in this folder. When a recording has finished, it is moved out of the "incomplete" folder only if a recording of the same name does not already exist.

However, if you number tracks, it is possible to record the same song twice as the files will be saved with names like "001 - ABC.mp3" and "067 - ABC.mp3". Also, download folders are named by session time, so it is possible that across multiple recording sessions you download the same track again.

We are looking to change this in the future by having options for users to customise in depth, their download, naming and tagging options. As a workaround, you'll find that iTunes is very easy to use to find duplicate files. Simply sort by artist, song or album name, and duplicates will show up.

Not being able to connect is a symptom of another problem. The radio station may be busy, offline or the web address has changed. To confirm a connection issue, try previewing the stream in iTunes to see if iTunes can connect to the stream. Also, try updating the web address stored in RadioLover by importing the radio stations' details from iTunes or the web again.

RadioLover splits by actual clock time. If there are network connection problems, such as congestion, and data packets are lost, the recording may be of shorter length than expected.

The issue is probably firewall related. RadioLover broadcasts - or relays - what it is recording via a port on your computer, and iTunes connects to this port to listen to the broadcast. Your computer's firewall based on your system preferences, or a third party application such as Norton, may be blocking this firewall. Adjust your firewall settings to resolve this issue. You are free to pick any port number you wish in your firewall settings, and you can set this in RadioLovers' Preferences.

If you see a track name in the bottom right-hand corner of the main window, observe to see if it changes. You may be in the middle of recording a very long radio show, or DJ mix. Alternatively, the radio station may send some generic track name which never changes to reflect what is actually being broadcast. In this case, it won't be possible to split by song since the tract title never changes. You should assign a custom recording style to the stream to force manual recording, and split by time or size of recording file.

In the recording style for the stream, please select an appropriate language encoding. This should work for most radio stations. Note that the current protocols used for MP3 streaming do not really handle different language encodings well at all. Even iTunes has problems.

Still, in testing, there has been success with Latin based languages for characters with accents and graves, and also some foreign character sets such as Korean. Foreign characters if received properly are also saved correctly in ID3 tags of the MP3 file.