Digital Home Thoughts: Review: InstantFM Music

Recording Radio Made Easy



Once you've started recording, you have to be patient and wait for the magic to begin. Click over to the playlist tab and after about 8 hours it will begin to be populated with a chronological playlist for that station. The software warns you that it will be slow at first and that you won't see much, but that it will pick up speed as it starts to identify patterns. Even with this warning, I was pretty disappointed at first. After 8 hours it had identified one whole song and it still had not figured out the ID tag for it. After a day, I was up to 10 songs. Then things started picking up. After four days, I am up to over 200 songs, most of which have been tagged. I was really kind of surprised here since I would have guessed that the playlist for this station was quite a bit smaller. I clicked through a sample of songs and they were all tagged properly and edited as well as could be expected for the start and stop of the song. There is some DJ talk over on some songs, but the software documentation indicates that this will improve over time because it will continuously look for a better version of the song. Below is a sample of the playlist tab. On the left, you will see the chronological listing of what the station played. Once you select a song, it will automatically start playing as well as pull up additional information about the song and artist in the right pane.



Clicking over to the songs tab gives you a sortable listing of all the songs Snaptune One has recorded. Clicking on a song in the left pane gives you the same information in the right pane that you saw on the playlist tab. From here, you can right click on any song and have it converted to an unprotected 128kbps MP3. The MP3 is tagged with the song and artist name, but Snaptune is substituted for the album name. Unfortunately, you must do this for each song as there is no bulk convert function.



So the big question is: how is the sound quality? Well, you are recording radio, so obviously it is not going to be any better than the source material. So, for comparison purposes, I loaded some songs up on my Samsung YP-U2J. Since this device has an FM tuner, I figured listening to the recorded songs versus a live FM broadcast would be a good test. The results were great, granted I am not an audiophile, but I could not tell a difference between the live broadcast and the recording. There was definitely a difference between recordings and a CD ripped at the same bitrate, but after some tweaks to the equalizer, I was able to get a very satisfactory level of sound from the recordings.

Don't take my word for it though, here is a sample.mp3 (Size: 154.5 KB).

I think Snaptune One is really cool. It totally digitizes the time-honored tradition of making radio mix tapes like I'm sure lots of us did in our younger days. If anything, it makes the process too easy, so hopefully it doesn't raise the ire of the powers that be. Even without it, the InstantFM Music package is an easy way to add FM music to your PC.

Chris Gohlke is a Contributing Editor for Digital Media Thoughts. He loves Sci-Fi and loves to get his hands on real-life tech gadgets. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, USA with his wife and three cats.