Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Audials One Software

I’m not sure if anyone is already using this software Audials One or even interested but I’m so impressed with it I just have to give a shout out to it.

I downloaded and played with it some yesterday to get a feel for it. I fired it up this morning before leaving for drill and told it to find jpop mp3s of 128bit or higher and when I got home it had already ripped just under 1200 unique songs from various internet radio stations and categorized them into 32 different subdirectories based on genre. Many have album art an lyrics. Some are tagged as known good and seem to be, others are tagged as questionable indicating that a dj may have over part or that the beginning or end may have been clipped or overextended, which you can then edit out.

Only listened to a fraction but it seems like most of the rips are done well but I am totally unimpressed with 128bit, ok they mostly sound like crap. But the 320bit do sound quite well on my Sennheiser headphones but won’t be able to give them a real test until Monday morning when the neighbors are all at work.

Nice thing is it converts from and to about any audio/video file format you might want. Still learning about it but has to be the best Christmas present I’m gonna get this year.

That looks like a really cool package. You should chime in again when you've had more time with it. I'm interested.

Ok this thing is getting cooler by the minute.

Here’s some of the more useful stuff I‘ve noticed but it‘s only a tip of the iceberg.

The rip quality is mostly a function of bit rate however one station seem poorer than others. Discovered this while listening to an offending song in the built in player. Just selected the sort by station option and only tracks from that station display. Sampled them and found they were all poor sounding. Right click on one track and selected “ban station” and that one is no longer recorded another couple clicks and all the offending tracks were history.

Most tracks cut correctly only few out of the 100 or so I’ve listened to were chopped at the beginning (deleted them) about 1 in 20 fade into the next song. Just click cut while the track is selected in the player and the editor opens, drag the cut to the right place, click save and all fixed.

Options menu allows auto fade in/out settings if fading wanted. If normalization is wanted the dB level can be set. Files can be auto converted to other formats with original saved or deleted.

Radio ripper, player and editor all integrate seamlessly. Ripper search function can be edited by right clicking on track in player with things like (find more of <artist>, find similar to <artist>, ban station, favorite station, large selection of options to configure in the ripper w/o even leaving the player.

Radio station filter can be set to specific countries, bit rate ranges, mp3 and/or AAC.

Limit ripping by bandwidth, number of stations, countdown time, record specific timeframes, record set amount of data, auto shutoff computer what done.

This has to be one of the most user friendly pieces of software I’ve ever used.

I’ll post more as I have time to play with this. I hate drill weekends no time to do anything.

Very cool Dean! Keep us posted please.

Jason

Trying out the MusicFinder tab of RadioTracker. Allows you to create wish-lists of tracks or artists to monitor thousands of internet radio stations for. From the artist list I selected “Blink 182” and added it to the list I was already running. Meanwhile the “radio” tab is still ripping the one 320bit jpop station I found.

With “Blink 182” highlighted in the MusicFinder list I clicked on “search music” which switches you over to mp3videoraptor (the searching/ripping engine) program and automatically imported “Blink 182 and started searching for downloadable versions. With “mp3 and video” selected (searches for and displays both/can also display just mp3 or just video) it found thousands of Blink 182 tracks. I right clicked on “All the Small Things” and selected “search for this title” and it quickly found hundreds of tracks from about 60 sites. Switched display to mp3 only and slide the quality slider to 3 stars out of 5 (the best available in this case). Picked one and hit play to listen. Sounded ok even though the bit rate displayed was only 192. Right click and downloaded.

Switched display to video only and displayed hundreds of “all the small things” videos from about 50 “artists” (a couple were variations of “blink 182” others were site names or covers/the “exact” toggle eliminates all but the exact search string). Scrolled down to “Lynne & tessa” (a couple of German girls who lipsync the song) and downloaded as an mp4 (no previewing videos).

Quality didn’t seem quite as good as one I had already downloaded from Youtube with “keepvid.com” so I opened IE and surfed to Youtube and the found Lynne & tessa’s video. As soon as it started playing I switched to mp3videoraptor’s “surf & catch” tab and Lynne & tessa’s youtube version was queued up for download (I had deselected “download all watched clips automatically”) Downloaded this version as an mp4. Also ripped the same one with keepvid.com to ensure I was comparing exactly the same ones.

Here’s where it stumbles a little. The keepvid.com version looked better and was about 11Mb vs the Audials One version which was about 20Mb and had more macro blocking when the girls are dancing around. The difference wasn’t noticeable in a smaller window but in full screen the keepvid.com version was noticeably better. For easy of use Audials One was the clear winner over cutting & pasting the URL, downloading, renaming and copying the file required by keepvid.com.

Went back to music search and told it to display all of the “all the small things” videos it found. Selected 5 star quality and one video was left. Downloaded this as an mp4. Near flawless in full screen but was 30Mb. It was also the bands real video which has them dancing around (in underwear?)…deleted…sticking with the German girls.

All the while the Radio program’s “RadioTracker” was still ripping 320bit jpop station, it’s “music finder” had ripped one live feed of “all the small things” and it’s “podcast” finished downloading a Japanese topless game show (gotta love Japan).

So far the program has run flawlessly on my XP machine. I even fired up WMP while watching a video in it’s built-in viewer and nothing locked up while both video and audio streams played.

Just to reacap the only flaw I’ve found so far is that it’s mp4 encoders (has more than one) don’t do as good as at least one other (keepvid.com) but still much easier to use.

Ok this is more than long enough so I’ll post more later.

P.S. almost forgot I was also listening to the previously downloaded jpop mp3s in the built in player and deleting or tagging their quality while doing all of the rest of this.

Cheers,
Dean

Here’s some more findings some fairly random.

Finally got the program to crash overnight. I left the RadioTracker ripping one jpop station while the MusicFinder was scouring stations for specific tracks and artists. Looks like about 2 hours after going to sleep it got pissed off that the bittorrent client running on another computer was hogging all the bandwidth I told RadioTracker it could have. Will limit the bandwidth to the Bittorrent client to see if that prevents it happening again.

Still in 2 hours it found over 30 tracks from 4 of the 6 artists it was searching for all at the 128bit minimum I set. Don’t seem to be many 192 or 320bit streams out there though the station manager does tell you which ones are there if you only want to download only from them.

Another possible glitch is that unlike the radio player which cuts it’s rips pretty well only about 1 in 20 is needing a minor edit at the beginning or end the track, however for the MusicFinder it was about 1 in 10 and it had a couple tracks where the DJ was recorded for a couple minutes before or after the song (this only happened on two German stations?) Another limit is that the editor can only cut and or fade about the first and last 30 seconds of the track. Seems purpose built to make the application simple and is good enough for 98% of the cases.

The flags that tell you if a rip was cut well seem spot on, however the flags for poorly cut rips are about 50/50. Some are false positives and some are just missed but it does narrow down the ones you find while listening. Tracks are tagged by which program ripped them which makes hunting down the poor cuts easier.

The MusicFinder doesn’t filter out previously ripped tracks, probably good since having multiple to choose from based on quality is advantageous. It also stores all the radio rips in a separate subdirectory from the manual downloads.

What MusicFinder found was both interesting and as suspected. For Nena and The Bangles it ripped multiple copies of their most popular songs. For Nena and Peter Schilling it found tracks I’d never heard before. For The Human League it found tracks I hadn’t heard in years and for Blondie it found a French language version of “Sunday Girl.”

The mp3videoraptor program (direct search/downloads) copies the tracks “as is” without applying normalization like the RadioTracker can, however you can run the track through Tunebit (the converter) and apply it there. So far about 1 of 100 tracks found with mp3videoraptor points to a track different from what’s named or to a dead link.

Virtually every program allows you to right click on a track and tell one of the other programs to search for more from the same or similar artists which brings up a huge list to select from. Some discretion needed as I’m not sure about Led Zeppelin being similar to Joan Jett?

P.S. I know double post so sue me.

Dean - thanks for all the info. I enjoyed reading it all, double-post included!

Jason

Dean, I'm really glad to see your posts.

I purchased this software a couple months ago and am VERY pleased.

My original motivation was purely for converting iTunes music to MP3: a task which I think AudialsOne does more easily than anything else I've come across. I've also used the MP3/Video Raptor extensively to find lots of music (for portables).

I think the program has easily paid for itself. I count it among a select group of software that is "worth the cost" and would recommend it.

So how come YOU haven't been writing in-depth reviews of the software? You make Dean do it? While he's trying to serve his country and all.... you leave HIM to have to write this stuff?

Evil-doer.

Okay, first off, my wife's name is not "Evil".

Secondly, Dean just seems to care more than I do. Plus he's better at it. I mean really, when you're looking for quality feedback, I know you're not looking to me anyway.

Sucking-square-room, maple-syrup eating yankee photophile.

I hope your Onkyo runs hot.

Thanks, but her name isn't "Onkyo" either.

Tom scores the double EPIC WIN.

He has truly earned his medic8r manor pin.


To continue this ad nauseum, by any chance is Mark's wife named "Square room" or "Maple syrup"?

Thanks for the feedback. I haven’t really used the converter much yet but some guys at work were asking about it so I will pass this along.


Thanks but I’d feel guilty if I didn’t remind people that about 75% of the time I’m a civil service employee. Picture 10 city workers standing around watching one guy shovel gravel into a pothole as you drive buy, well civil service is just the Federal version of that only in my job it‘s watching people work on aircraft. It’s only part of the time we are doing 12-16 hour days supporting Katrina, or changing tires in the UAE at 130 degrees or replacing brakes at -14 in <censored>.


That’s just mean.

Here we go again, actually time to get serious since what’s the point of ripping thousands of tracks if you don’t do anything with them. Well this thing actually makes it easy to get real value out of what’s being ripped. I just started listening from the beginning deleting keeping and occasionally editing tracks. If a song sounded really interesting I just select to filter by artist. Listen to several songs and decide this artist is worth more investigation so right click and add to music finder. Uncheck the filter and your back to stepping through the main list.

No double rips from the Radio. I’ve selected for it to only keep the best copy. However, MusicFinders rips are more problematic so it’s instructed to keep any rips that differ my more than 10 seconds. Neat because it’s finding many different versions of the same songs.

I’ve already found 4 artists whos CDs I plan to order Ai Otsuka, Angela Aki, Hayami Kishimoto, and Hayashibara Megumi and about 10 more who I‘m interested in but waiting for more rips to see. It’s been particularly good at finding album art from these artists so I even know which CDs to get.

Also figured out Yoko Kanno who I knew did “Green Bird” from Cowboy Bebop but didn’t know he composed the music for Ghost in the Shell SAC and 2ndgig including the themes. 3 more CDs to buy.

Also figured out how to further customize the Radio search. There are 3 buttons that can be activated simultaneously which can refine the stations/artists monitored and ripped besides what’s already being looked for in the MusicFinder. The favorites button prioritizes rips from one of the favorites list you make. You can also enable “Taste in Music” and it will also search for the artists in and similar to those in your MusicFinder wish list. You can further specify a genre to stay within. Also figured out why no Japanese stations were showing up. In the Radio>Options>Filter “Suppress Far East Stations” is enabled by default (those bastards) so now a much broader selection of Jpop is showing up.

I wanted an mp3 of “I want candy” by the Strangeloves but mp3videorapter couldn’t find one so knowing Youtube had one I enabled the video search found it but before downloading opened the advanced tab. Selected “audio only” and “mp3” for the format. It will automatically convert 2 copies so selected FLAC for the second one. Also enabled keep original for comparison. A couple minutes later and 3 Strangelove tracks are waiting. Hard to tell the quality of the conversion from video to audio because the original sounded like crap but they did sound the same.

This sounds like an amazing program. So much so, I'm kind of afraid to even try it. I can easily see me sifting and exploring through thousands of items every night until all hours of the morning.

I hear the word "composer" and think man, too, but Yoko Kanno is actually a woman. Of course, your finger could have just missed the s, and I'm parading around my sexism. Ha ha.

Noticed the time hack on my post did you? In the last “review post” I make in this thread that was going to be one of the Cons to buying this program. As if I don’t already have enough excuses to waste time in front of the computer already. I guess a side benefit is that the TV has been off for days now.


Thanks for catching that. I did miss the “s” but not your normal type-o sort of miss, more your basic brain-don’t-work-right type. I have pretty bad dyslexia I once even misspelled the word “of“ as “ov“ in a paper. The girl who was proofing my papers thought I was messing with her, thank heavens for spell check, unfortunately “he” is a real word. I also have to be very careful of writing run-on-sentences but it makes reading Marx easier. I try to proof things carefully so people don’t think I’m being lazy or rude but sometimes things just slip by especially in the wee hours of the morning. One benefit of being dyslexic is that having a miss-wired brain is suppose to enhance “outside the box” thinking ability or is that the concussions can‘t remember.

I figure I should write a conclusion in case anyone happens on this thread as I have rambled on a bit. If I use “Tunebite” the converter DRM remover I’ll post about it but no plans to play with it in the near future.

First here’s a pretty good synopsis of what it does with some screenshots:

http://www.techchee.com/2008/09/24/audialsone-downloads-and-records-free-music-and-videos-legally/

Here’s the good and bad IMO so far.

Pros:
- Exposure to 100s of new artists allows “trying before buying”
- Intuitive interface (easy for beginners)
- Excellent customization for a GUI interface utility (for power users)
- Outstanding automation (powerful search + filters saves time)
- 3 separate utilities but seamlessly integrated.
- Very stable on XP (even with many other, even I/O intensive, programs running)
- Reviewing/saving/deleting/editing tracks easy

Cons:
- Only for XP/Vista (+mp3videoraptor only supports surf & catch from IE)
- $60.00 price (but paid for itself in less than 1 hour but…)
- $$$ Buying more CDs from newly discovered artists
- Mp4 converter not the best
- 1000s of tracks may be overwhelming without a separate media organizer
- Can only edit first and last 30 seconds or so of track.
- German DJs talk to much over songs.

This is greatly expanding my music horizons by removing the risk of buying something that might suck. Without a doubt this is the best $60 I’ve spent on the hobby. YMMV if you already have large mp3 collections or know everything you want already. Also not all genres are equally supported on the internet only one African station that I can find.

Cheers,
Dean

Nice summary Dean, thanks for all the work you put into using this application.

I look forward to trying it out someday. I am still working on getting all that I can out my 3808 and using REW. I bought this sound card today to use with the laptop and REW. I will let you know how it works.

That looks cool, definitely want to see what you think of it. Might be nice to have something like that when flying.

I must amend this comment because of new information I just learned. It should say that “AFAIK this program is 100% legal even in the USA as purchased.” Read the Mp3VideoRaptor section below for the caveats.

Audialsone is really 4 programs packaged together, you can actually detach them and have them run in separate skins but they are so well integrated there in no advantage I can see in doing that.

The one I use the most is “RadioTracker.” It’s source is streaming internet radio from 1,000s of stations. AFAIK it’s just as legal as recording any radio or TV broadcast for private use as long as you don’t share it. Also I don’t think that there is any way to get a virus from streaming internet radio but I may be wrong.

Mp3VideoRaptor is a meta-search engine that uses many sites to find and record streamed internet music and videos. AFAIK none of these are direct downloads but all streaming. However, I just found that since I last used it this program has been modified.

It no longer comes with all the available music streaming sites preloaded. All the video sites still come standard but now the music sites have been offloaded to installable 3rd party plug-ins. I imagine I relates to this:

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3ie1a7ca1ab495f9f44c9b4b8443d81cac

And Audialsone now comes with the following disclaimer:



This was always the most legally questionable part of the program IMO mainly because I wasn’t sure of the legality of the sites hosting the sharing. I thought these sites would remain legal since they are streaming and not file sharing like Napster but it looks like the RIAA has other ideas. Perhaps they will go after internet radio next?

Tunebite - is the conversion software that allows you to convert between 50 or so file formats. Part of the cost of the program is for the licensing to copy to and from some proprietary and copy protected formats again the assumption is not to share them.

Tagrunner - searches for mp3 tags, album covers and lyrics for your downloads. It’s pretty hit or miss and I think that Mediamonkey does a better job.

Audials One no longer has the integrated ability to directly download from various sources. It’s now done via 3rd party plug-ins which for the most part are kept up-to-date but not always, especially for sites like YouTube which seem to be changing around their methods of stream to circumvent downloads. So clearly this part of the software is problematic from a copyright perspective. However, very easy to use plug-ins for Firefox make it even easier to download things like videos from YouTube so any intermittent functionality in Audials One has gone unnoticed for me recently.

Recording streaming radio for personal use is still 100% legal and a fantastic way to find new bands.

I haven’t bothered to upgrade to the V3 so I can’t specifically comment on it.

Audials One

review