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
