For a quick overview please see the comparison chart.

RadioLover is designed to schedule, record and split MP3 radio streams into individual songs. This covers most of the MP3 radio stations in iTunes, and on sites such as Shoutcast.com, Live365, PublicRadioFan, and vTuner. RadioLover does not support RealAudio stations, or QuickTime stations - only MP3. Songs are easy to organise as they are tagged with artist, album and song information.

iRecordMusic is designed to record almost any internet audio (radio, music video, film trailers, other sound content) into AIFF, MP3, AAC (and more!) audio files. It works like a browser and when audio can be captured a button will light up. While a user can split recordings manually, or by time, iRecordMusic does not split a recording into individual songs like RadioLover can.

The downloaded file is a disk image, and should end with .dmg. To open it, double-click the icon in Finder. Alternatively, in Finder, launch the Disk Utility, and then drag the disk image to the Disk Utility icon in the Dock menu. Once the disk image is open, copy the application by dragging the application icon to your Applications folder. Make sure it copies the application, and is not creating a short cut.

An Alias is a short-cut. Please re-install the software, making sure that when you copy the software to your hard drive the Finder is not making a short-cut. Otherwise, the system will try to launch the application from the disk image which may, at a later date, have been ejected.

The web page cannot be opened because your system is missing an Internet plug-in to handle the media on the web page. This problem will affect all browsers on your system, Safari, Explorer, Firefox, as well as iRecordMusic.

Depending on the broadcast format, for example, RealAudio, or WindowsMedia, you will need to install the free RealPlayer or WindowsMedia player.

RealPlayer (Link to free player is in top right-hand corner of web page)

http://www.real.com

WindowsMediaPlayer

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/software/Macintosh/osx/default.aspx

After installing, quit all browsers including iRecordMusic. Next time you launch iRecordMusic, it will make use of the plug-ins to allow you to see the web page properly and record from it. It is also recommended you run Disk Utility to Repair Disk Permissions after installation.

Your details were sent to you via e-mail in an e-mail titled 'Thanks for your purchase', after your order was submitted successfully. Please check your e-mail folders, as your ISP or mail package's spam filters may have filtered the e-mail into a junk folder. If you do not receive the e-mail after 1-2 days, please contact us on <support@iRecordMusic.com>.

Registration details are case sensitive and need to be entered exactly as shown in your order receipt e-mail. Copying and pasting is recommended. Here are some common problems when entering registration codes: - Mixing up the letter O and the number 0 - Entering a familiar name such as 'Dave' instead of the registered name 'David' - Registered name was entered with two spaces between the first and last name - Using registration details for a different piece of software

Your details were sent to you via e-mail in an e-mail titled 'Thanks for your purchase'. If you can't find it, please visit our web-site's support pages and follow the instructions there to retrieve your registration details.

This should not happen, but may occur if your system has been re-installed, or there has been a system crash. You do not need to purchase the software again. Simply insert your registration details again.

If the computer sleeps, or has been turned off, the next time the computer awakes, iCal will fire off the alarms for any events it has missed. This will launch the helper AppleScripts which co-ordinate the scheduled recordings. For each missed recording, you will receive the message.

This is the helper AppleScript which iCal launches to process the scheduled recording. The helper AppleScript is generated by iRecordMusic whenever you create a scheduled recording, or refresh the calendar.

These errors occurred with older versions of iRecordMusic. Please install the latest update and permanently remove all older versions of iRecordMusic. Launch the new version, and select the menu option 'Refresh iRecordMusic calendar'. This will re-build the helper AppleScripts and should solve any compatibility issues between the different versions of scripts used to co-ordinate the scheduled recording.

Is FileVault enabled on your system? There is a bug in OS X where AppleScripts have problems resolving filenames on encrypted home directories. There is more information elsewhere in the FAQ.

The system cannot find iRecordMusic.app to load its AppleScript dictionary. This might be because iRecordMusic.app has moved location since you last ran it. You can solve this by launching iRecordMusic.app and keeping it running. Alternatively, launch Script Editor.app in the AppleScript foler in the Applications folder. In Script Editor, select the menu option 'Open Dictionary...' and then locate the iRecordMusic application. After doing this, your system should 'remember' where iRecordMusic is.

If the computer sleeps, iCal does not wake up the computer. We hope to be adding a wake-up feature to iRecordMusic soon. As a workaround, in Panther's System Preferences, under the Energy Saver, there are basic options to wake the computer up at a certain time. You could also create a custom energy setting where the screen turns off, but the computer does not sleep. There are also third party applications, such as iBeeZz, which focus on waking up, and you can find them by searching in VersionTracker.

Yes. As long as the user who has set up a recording calendar is still logged in, even if in the background, iCal and iRecordMusic will launch to co-ordinate the scheduled recordings.

iRecordMusic works in the background to compress recordings. If real-time encoding is not enabled, recordings are first saved in the AIFF format, before being compressed to another format such as AAC. In the case of AAC, finished recordings end with ".m4a". The AIFF files can optionally be removed. Temporary files, such as those beginning with "QT-" or with ".tmp", are removed automatically.

Press the key-combination Command-Option-N to launch a new copy of iRecordMusic. Another icon will appear in the Dock.

Your Internet connection's bandwidth determines how many audio sources you can connect to. Your computer's configuration (CPU, Memory) determines how quickly the recording and encoding can take place in the background. As an example, on a 3Mbps broadband connection, a G4-400Mhz TiBook can record from 4-5 sources as AIFF. Note that if you decide to use the real-time encoding option than it will be more of a drain on your computer's CPU.

Yes. Turning the system volume down to zero will have no effect on the recording. System bleeps will not interrupt the recording. Unlike other audio recording solutions, each iRecordMusic application records audio independtly of anything else occuring on your system. So you can use iRecordMusic without affecting your workflow and use of other applications such as iTunes or QuickTime.

Changing the volume directly from the web page affects the source of the audio, and thus will affect the final recording. Whatever you hear from iRecordMusic is what gets recorded (except the option to mute which does not affect the recording).

Yes, iRecordMusic can also act as a transcoder (albeit in real-time). Simply drag and drop the Real Audio file into an open iRecordMusic browser page. The file will load and start playing, and you can then record it to MP3.

Yes, you can record to AIFF format and burn the recordings to CD with Toast, or iTunes. If you record to other formats such as AAC or MP3, you can drag the recordings from the iRecordMusic playlist to a new playlist, and burn the playlist to CD.

Yes. AIFF recordings are supported almost universally. They are a great way to record audio as they capture audio without loss. A nice, free editor is Audacity.

You can also import compressed audio into applications for editing. Many editors support MP3. However, they will typically decompress the MP3 file to AIFF, and at the end of editing encode back to MP3. So there will be a slight loss in quality of the recording.

Note that for simple operations such as trimming an encoded file, or cutting and pasting sections, QuickTime Pro can do this, as well as MP3Trimmer. These files work on the encoded file and do not need to re-encode the recording.

Try using Audacity, a free sound editor, to load the AIFF file. You can then re-save it and you should be able to import it into iTunes or QuickTime for encoding. Or you can use Audacity to encode to MP3 (follow the Audacity instructions).

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.

Not being able to connect is a symptom of another problem. The radio station may be busy, offline or the web address has changed. Please check the web-site of the radio station to see if there are any service announcements, or if the web address has changed.

We cannot promise that every web-site is compatible with iRecordMusic, though most are. Some sites do strange things with HTML and Javascript before streaming content. While we make use of the engine underneath Safari, there are some things in Safari which are not available to us, so there may be problems. If so, send in the web address of the site, and we'll take a look. You can also load the web page in Safari and select 'View Source'. You might be able to find the URL of the streaming media, and you can try entering that directly into iRecordMusic.

Some sites, such as www.wilcoworld.net, explicitly launch QuickTime player. To avoid this, load the page in Safari, and view the page source. You will see a tag containing text like "target=quicktimeplayer" and "src=...". Copy the source URL and use it in iRecordMusic.

To solve this, you tell iRecordMusic to force the web address of the stream to be loaded inside its browser windows.

Look at the history in iRecordMusic, or the launched media player application to find the URL. Add the start of the URL to the the Forced Media Embedding preference option in Preferences.

For example, if you wanted to record audio clips found on Amazon's site, by adding "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/clipserve/" to the list of addresses, any audio clip which starts with this URL will be embedded into the iRecordMusic browser window, where it is played and can be recorded.

Recording an archive is the same way as recording from a live stream. Simply set-up iRecordMusic to start recording, and then start listening to the archived show. The archived show will be recorded just like a live stream. It doesn't matter whether the web-site offers a specific download link or not.

Right-click, or option-click, while hovering above the bookmark will pop-up a menu with the option to Delete the bookmark. Alternatively, simply press the Delete key, when the bookmark is selected.

Not at the moment. We are working on autmatic re-connection in case the connection times-out or there are temporary network problems.

With FileVault turned on, AppleScript has a bug whereby it cannot access files correctly if the file is located in the encrypted directory. Since the encrypted directory is the user's home directory this is rather problematic. This is a known OS X bug and we have to wait for Apple to fix it. If practical, turn off FileVault. Another reason not to use FileVault is that storing and manipulating large (e.g. gigabytes) of media files eats up CPU time for the encryption and decryption of data.

Workaround (unconfirmed so use at your own risk) supplied by user, who says, "If I create and mount a disk image with the same name as my home directory, AppleScript mysteriously becomes able to find files in my encrypted home directory. I'm using a 2MB disk image."

Another workaround is to create a new user on the system, without FileVault, and schedule recordings using that user's account. As long as the user remains logged on, recordings will occur, as Fast User Switching is supported.

Authentication is indeed broken in the Internet Plug-In. There are no current workarounds. Real have been notified of this problem and will be looking to fix this.

At the moment this is not possible, and it depends upon the volume set by the web-page or the media player used. We will try to make this customisable in the future.

This is not related to iRecordMusic. Some users on Panther have noticed strange audio problems and have fixed things by simply loading GarageBand, and playing a song. Other users use AudioMidi to restore their audio settings to default.

With RealPlayer 10, the browser plug-in's volume control is designed to initialize itself to 50% whenever the plug-in is loaded. The user can then change the volume, but it is not remembered the next time, and it is not possible to set a default value of say 100%.

Note that volume boosting can cause artifacts and distortion. Some encoders, such as MP3 Lame, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC can compute a value called 'Replay-Gain' which advises compatible players to boost the volume on play-back. iTunes is not known to support this Replay-Gain information and has its own Volume boost and EQ settings.