Replay Music Review

I have a subscription to Rhapsody which lets you listen to any song in their vast music catalog. The only bummer is you have to be online and connected to their website. But what if you could download their music and listen offline or take it on your portable player?

Well that is exactly what Replay Music allows you to do. It records the streaming music from subscription sites, saving it to your computer.

When I was looking around for a program to do this, Replay Music was the ONLY software that I found that was able to do so. Thankfully, it is also easy to setup and use.

The only prerequisites you need are a subscription to a streaming music site (there are free streaming music channels out there, but the subscription ones offer higher quality sounding music) and enough hard drive space to store all of your newly "downloaded" songs. I also highly recommend only using this if you have a fast connection to the Internet. Although I have not tried this on dial-up, I suspect that the quality would be too poor to be worth the effort.

Once you have Replay setup, just connect to the music site, hit record on Replay, start the music, and sit back and watch as Replay saves the streaming music to your computer, complete with correct track names.

The quality of the saved music is good (at least with Rhapsody, I have not tried others). It is not CD quality, but for an untrained ear, it is pretty close.

I did notice that you really shouldn't be surfing the net, or even using your computer, while trying to record. Sometimes if I tried to use the computer, it would cause Replay to add skips in the recorded tracks. When I left the computer alone, the music turned out fine. At least this is the experience on my system, perhaps a faster computer would have no problems at all.

The only other concern is the whole legal issue of downloading streaming music. But I'll leave that up to you to research and wrestle with.