Replay Music Review

I enjoy listening to online radios, and always wondered how nice it would be to record while listening, as we used to do in the pre-digital era with the old cassette recorder (if you don’t know what is a cassette recorder, ask your dad or grandpa).

I know that there are a few programs in the market that propose to capture streaming audio (a fancy name for the digital radio) and record it, but the ones I’ve seen so far generally are cumbersome to set up and sometimes mess up with your audio settings.

With that in mind, I decided to put Replay Music to a test. I quickly downloaded and installed its demo. The demo allows up to 25 recordings. For some reason the software decided that I had already used my share, although I hadn’t. I went to the publisher’s web site in seek of help and found out that the version I installed was 2.31, while the most current is 2.51!

Downloading and installing 2.51 did no good, as the software kept on insisting I had used my allowance. I was about to call my lawyer to sue them for discrimination, when I decided to install it on another computer. It worked like a charm.

The software has a nice interface, gives you hints when you start it, uses Gracenote CDDB to obtain information about songs (for tagging purposes), and has a good variety of options. Let me go through a few of them, to show how versatile it is.

Want to record a gig you and your friends will play? No problem, select input from microphone. Prefer to split your recordings automatically? Select how long each piece should be, and it is done. Connect through a proxy server? Even this possibility was taken into account, and you can inform the proxy server and port. But, best of all, you can choose if want to record in wav or mp3, and select the quality of the mp3 recording. You can even use it to burn your recordings to a CD.

To make it even better, they offer for free (that’s right: free!) another software called Radio Wizard that gives you the ability to schedule what and when you want to record, like Tivo. I did not test it, but it can be a good companion to Replay Music.

The publisher's site has a wide range of support resources: User Guide, FAQ and troubleshooter, Quick Start, Video Tutorial, etc.

The quality of the recording of course depends of the source you use. However, I noticed that it sounded a little bit “metallic”. As copying copyrighted material is illegal, this should not be a problem: like it, buy it.