AppFlow

How do you listen to music?  There are many ways to on a computer these days, Mac or otherwise.  You have your harddrive full of your favourite albums that you play using iTunes or similar.  Maybe you still use CD’s, Cassettes or Vinyl.  Or perhaps you use a radio either FM, MW, LW, DAB, through your television or, Internet.  There are loads of ways to listen to your favourite tracks these days, as well as discovering new ones.  If I were  to go into all of the possibilities, I would likely be here until next week!  However, as it is, I’ve selected one particular method to look at in detail – Internet Radio.

Snowtape is an application that takes control of all of your internet radio needs in one, neat window.  It has all of the features that any web player has, plus some extra features that make it worthy of a place on your desktop.

Interface

If you’re used to iTunes, the Snowtape interface shouldn’t take too long to get used to.  It feels very familiar and is very simple.

The left hand sidebar gives you the options to browse stations in the online directory, as well as select the stations you have already imported.  It also offers a handy ‘favourite’ feature that lets you populate a list of just your favourite stations – very handy if you import a lot.

Directory

The Snowtape online directory (accessed by selecting the ‘Directory’ button on the left hand sidebar) works very like the iTunes store.  You can search it for your favourite online stations or browse by genre, country etc.  It also gives you the ‘top 100′ stations overall and in your country.  This is very useful for looking for different stations and different music that might interest you.

If you see a station that you like the look of, you can click ‘tune in’ to listen to it right away.  This works sort of like the preview in iTunes.  If you like the station, you can click the little arrow next to it and select ‘Import Station’ or ‘Import as Favourite’.  The station will then appear in your ‘All Stations’ list (or ‘Favourites if you selected that).

Recording

Some of the stations in the online directory have a little red flag next to them.  This indicates that they are suitable for recording.  While you can record any station using snowtape, these are the ones that broadcast the currently playing track.  This means that Snowtape will look up the album art of that track and display it in the bottom left of the screen.  It will also add all of the relevant information to that track’s recorded file, as well as cutting the recording before and after.  This means that you just tune to your favourite station that supports this, press record, and later you can listen to all of the music that was played.

Editing

Of course, this is all very well, but all of the tracks you have recorded will have little bits of talking either end by the radio station.  Introducing the track, or even the edge of an advert.  You want to edit these off, right?  Snowtape can help here too.  Simply right click on a track that you have recorded (accessed by selecting ‘All Recordings’ on the left hand sidebar) and select ‘Edit’.

This brings up am editing bar which, even if slightly on the simple side, allows you to cut down to just the track you want.  Very simple indeed!

Exporting

Once you’ve recorded and edited your music using Snowtape, you want to export it iTunes in order to play on your iPod, Apple TV etc.  Snowtape even makes this easy.  Simply press the ‘Export to iTunes’ button and it creates a new playlist in iTunes of all of your recorded music.  It also copies across all of the data about the track’s artist, album and even album art.

Conclusion

Snowtape is a very good application for managing internet radio stations and playing internet radio.  It then goes on to offer many recording, and even editing tools that make it an amazing app – and  a must have for any internet radio listener.  Go ahead and download the trial from the Snowtape website, or buy the full version for only £19.