Broadclip Results

Hmmm... so my test with Broadclip didn't go as well as I had hoped. I'm guessing some of it is a "cold start" problem, but here's what I got after running their agent all night.

• Birdmonster = no results
• The Thermals = no results
• U2 = 2 results (although both results were the same song)

I also got a bunch of songs that I would consider "crap" based on my selections. Artists such as "Ace of Base", "Hillary Duff", etc. It's not a stretch to understand that U2 could very well be played on the same station as those others (considering their popularity and widespread appeal), but I was hoping for a little more intelligence based on the context of my other selections (Birdmonster/The Thermals).

More disappointingly, once "clipped" the song was actually cropped in the middle and turned into two separate MP3s - one with the first half of the song, the other with the second half. Obviously a bug that I hope will be resolved soon.

The other (more) major issue is that there are no settings allowing you to specify a minimum bitrate for the songs that you wanted. Obviously, doing so would result in less matches, and a longer amount of time required to get what you are interested it, but my U2 song(s) were at 24kbps/MONO(!). This is a function of the station that is broadcasting it, but I would like to bea able to filter those out. Basically, songs at that low quality are not something I would ever want to sync to my portable and listen to repeatedly.

So, I'm going to give Broadclip more time to cook before I try them again. I still think it is interesting, but not yet ready for primetime.

Broadclip - TiVo for Internet Radio

One of the more interesting things I saw at CES just went into beta this week. Broadclip started off focused on TV (if your PC had a TV tuner), but have just added the music features. Here's how it basically works:

• You download a little agent to your PC (runs in the systray)
• You go to their website and tell them what bands you like. Search for an artist then "clip it".
• They search the SHOUTcast directory for stations that are likely to play those artists
• They trigger their app on your PC to record those stations in the background (stream rip) while they keep a time-synchronized record of what songs were played when. So, on your PC exists a big contiguous MP3 of dozens of songs.
• You go back to their website to see what songs you now have in that file. You can pick particular songs and then will then tell the agent on your PC to "clip" out the songs you want and/or throw away the ones you don't.
• It doesn't clip out just that one song (more like a block of 4 or 5 songs around it), but with a basic audio editor you could easily clip just the one song you want.

They are claiming protection under fair-use and that it is just "tivo for internet radio". But I have a feeling that the RIAA isn't going to see it that way. Also, I'm assuming that if the PERFORM act is passed (and radio stations have to be DRM'd) then that would break it as well.

Others that do similar things: Streamripper (windows) and RadioLover (mac).

I'm just now checking it out. I've selected 2 relatively obscure (Birdmonster, The Thermals) and 1 big artist (U2) and had it running for about an hour. So far it hasn't picked up any songs by either of them but I'll let it run all night and see what it turns up in the morning.