streamWriter 5.5

Described by its developers as some sort of an online audio recorder for broadcasted music, streamWriter looks more like a peculiar audio downloader to me. What makes it different from similar tools is that streamWriter looks only among a long list of Internet radios looking for recently broadcasted audio tracks. You can pick the ones you are interested in or just grab whatever tracks become available.

The program connects to thousands of radio stations and creates long lists of tens of thousands of streams for you to choose from. The radios are categorized thematically so you know well in advance the type of music you’re going to get. The program will tell you the expected format (either MP3 or AAC) and the level of quality of the recorded/downloaded tracks. If you set the program to “Automatic recording”, it will save to your disc whatever tracks are being played on the stations you selected. Alternatively, you can use the built-in search engine and look for specific artists, albums, and songs among all the latest broadcasts. You can create your own “wishlist” and “ignorelist”, as well as leave out any already recorded file.

streamWriter includes a basic yet attractive waveform-based audio editor, which will let you perform basic operations, such as cutting and trimming your audio tracks. One way to avoid removing unwanted fragments and ads from your downloaded files is by setting the program to ignore streams shorter than a specific number of seconds and to remove any silent gaps of a length of your choice. You can also apply some basic effects to your audio files (such as fade in/fade out or convert AAC tracks into M4A files), but most of these utilities need to be downloaded separately as add-ons, which may be a bit annoying sometimes.

streamWriter is a curious tool. It is a free and innovative way to download tracks from the Internet quickly and automatically making use of the thousands of songs being broadcasted every minute on the Web. If you are not too picky with the audio quality or with the choice of tracks available (remember they need to be broadcasted first), this free “music grabber” may well help you to build an interesting music collection in no time. I can only recommend you to give it a try and see if it works for you.