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.
