Download MP3s FREE and LEGALLY, it says here. Hmm. You’ll have to pardon a certain level of healthy scepticism on our part – while Radio Tracker is basically the internet equivalent of recording songs off the radio, we really wouldn’t want to stand in front of a judge in the current legal climate. In particular, recording from a station that hasn’t paid licensing fees for its audience quickly kills any hope of fair use, not to mention the basic questionability of downloading music files over the net. Still, you’re not actually sharing them, so even if this practice is one day dubbed as piratical as parrot droppings on your shoulder, the odds of getting caught are pretty minimal.

Radio Tracker is a simple enough program, but works very well. You begin not with a list of stations but a selection of genres – everything from acid jazz to Bluegrass. In its simplest mode, Radio Tracker connects to as many as it can simultaneously, pulling down data by the crateload and chopping them up into individual MP3 files. Songs are automatically faded out and given basic Title and Artist ID3 tags, ready for sorting in your library, and you can choose how much you want Radio Tracker to download at any given time – leave it on all night, and you’ll almost be able to hear the sound of MP3s acting out the Sorcerer’s Apprentice scene from Fantasia across your hard drive.

More usefully still, you can set up filters to select only particular songs or artists – in effect, your computer waits overnight for a station in your chosen genre to play something more specific, download it, and leave the collection for you to access in the morning, skipping short jingles and transitions between tunes. Obviously, you’ll get better files by buying the track from iTunes or ripping it from a CD, but that goes without saying – and barring a few truncated songs, the quality was surprisingly good in all the files we definitely didn’t have it download for us. (Got that, lawyers? Just in case, you understand…) Radio Tracker is an extremely effective program, taking advantage of the reams of free stations on the net and giving access to all the music you could ever hope to listen to.