Internet radio offers options well beyond the powers of old-fashioned broadcasting, but something’s still missing--that’s because many music apps don’t go the extra mile themselves to let you record internet-radio streams. Radio Gaga plays and records thousands of stations, but the more you try to do with it, the more you’ll only hear static.
Gigantic icons mean too much scrolling to manage recording schedules.
At launch, Gaga loads over 10,000 stations from around the world, all organized by genre. If you already have a favorite station, you can enter its URL or drag it into Radio Gaga from iTunes. But during our testing, Gaga was intermittently unable to connect with its built-in stations and refused to record some we added manually (tech support promised that an update will address the recording issue). These headaches aside, Gaga has some nifty tricks, like recording multiple stations simultaneously with a click or according to schedules. It also filters by song title and artist keywords, so you could record a talk show at noon on one station, two hours of tunes with “love” in the title on another, just the songs by Vampire Weekend on a third, and so on. The only limits to how much you can record are bandwidth and drive space. Once you’ve grabbed them, recorded songs are conveniently split into different MP3 tracks complete with metadata provided by their stations. Tracks can be exported to iTunes or played in Gaga from playlists that keep your favorite songs and stations handy.
Recording filters are handy, but they have to be made from scratch for every station.
That all sounds mighty powerful, but Gaga is held back by its inflexible interface. Filters and schedules are linked to the station they’re applied to and can’t be saved independently. If you stop recording a filtered station or delete its schedule, those settings disappear. Worse, you can’t edit multiple stations’ schedules and filters--or even copy and paste them between stations. If you want to record a dozen stations at various times for your favorite artists, you have to make unique settings for each one, then edit them individually to do something as simple as add a new artist keyword. That takes patience. Schedules also appear as oversized icons that can’t be sorted, forcing too much scrolling to find what you want. Combined, these limitations make it needlessly difficult to work with several stations simultaneously, undermining the value of Gaga’s better features and its access to so much radio programming.
Records multiple internet radio stations simultaneously. Schedules and filters recordings. Exports recorded tracks to iTunes.
Frustrating interface. Access to built-in stations sometimes flaky. Mysteriously unable to record some audio streams.
