I featured RadioLover in my list of favorite Mac apps a few months ago, but I’ve just started using it again after a long lapse and wanted to do a full-fledged post on its genuine awesomeness again. This is such a cool little app for finding new music or jazzing up a stagnating collection. It allows you to stream internet radio stations through the interface and automatically breaks each stream into individual, tagged songs that are then dumped right into iTunes.

I’m the kind of person who is very big on finding hidden treasure in a pile of junk (thrifting, “surprise bonus bags” when shopping, etc.). For some reason I have a love of all things that form “kits” of any kind where I can take them apart and reconfigure to my exact needs, feeling thoroughly clever when all is said-and-done. RadioLover allows me to do just that: after amassing a small treasure trove of questionable new tracks and artists in the bottom of my iTunes library, I get the chance to delete any particularly corny sounding/looking ones and wiggle with excitement at some I can’t wait to listen to. The rest are all surprises which get thrown onto my iPod for experimentation during a day’s commute.

I’ve discovered several bands from that last category in this way including Charmparticles, Catherine Wheel, Tiger Trap, and even Siouxsie and the Banshees, I think. The hardest part is forcing yourself not to press the next button on your iPod when some random song comes on, even though it will seem like it’s all invading your precious familiar listening space. Patience, patience.

But where do you find these stations to stream in the first place, you ask? Well, I have several pretty good sources so far, not to mention WOXY.com which is my favorite station ever (you may already have some of your own).

ITUNES RADIO

Yep, good old iTunes has that “Radio” link on the left which you probably never even noticed, but it has a lot of decent, preset stations in there from all over the place. They are all segmented by genre, and after you expand one of those options I’d recommend clicking on the Bit Rate tab at the top to sort them from highest to lowest bit rate. It’s always nice to get some 128kbps streams (or higher, which is rare), especially in stereo. If they aren’t, it’s no big deal, though I wouldn’t want to go below 64kbps. The radioio (”radio-EYE-OH”) ones always seem to be good.

SHOUTCAST

Despite being a completely hideous eyesore, Shoutcast.com is a great place to search for streams being broadcast all over the world. I like to search by my favorite artists and see what kind of stations come up that are currently playing them. I tend to search for Bjork a lot first, for some reason. Her voice absolutely kills me, in a particularly wonderful way. Sorry, Bjork gushing side note! Anyhow, you can also search by bit rate here too, so keep an eye on that.

Once you’ve identified some streams you want to start recording, all you have to do is click on the play link and drag it into RadioLover, then press the record button at the top. It’s that easy (you’ll want to adjust the preferences for deletion of small songs, etc.). You can sort your streams and organize them into folders once you start collecting a lot, too. I tend to have a core of several streams I always keep on-hand, but the rest tend to get deleted and supplemented on an as-need basis determined by my fickle tastes of the day.

RadioLover is only free in demo form, but to be honest that is exactly how I like it. The demo only allows you to record streams in chunks of 30 minutes, and then it stops the current recording. I don’t really want to dig through more than a half hour’s worth of multiple station recordings at a time, though (yep, you can record as many streams at once as you want!). You can also do VCR-like programmed recordings of stations for the future if you have a talk-radio show you’d like to hear but can’t get for some reason, etc., so it would be nice to have an unlimited recording time for those purposes. I don’t use it for that, though, so I don’t care!

I also like to go to a blog called Crash and Burn Girl to see what’s new on the indie-music radar, in that subtle, feminine kind of way. Ayala, a random gal I friended on Last.fm, keeps this awesome blog full of little discoveries she makes about new albums, artists, and other things she wants to see or do musically (too bad she’s poor and isolated in Georgia!), many of them international. Very good read, and always a backup on my list of artists-to-check-out (and she often provides live links to the songs and videos discussed).

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• My Favorite Mac Apps
• SONG OF THE DAY - Arctic Monkeys

Tags: internet, itunes, Mac, Music, radiolover, record, streaming, tag