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You still remember the old days with radios and tape players?

Revival in the pre-DSL era

At the dawn of the Internet boom and around the time when transferring data online became easier, the RapidSolution Software AG, along with other copycats of the day, attempted to modernize recording music by releasing air2mp3. The new differed from the original in that it did not record straight from radio, but rather used a TV tuner card to record music videos from MTV and other music video channels. The songs were then edited using a partially automated editing program. The software was primarily used in Germany, which, along with services provided by RapidSolution, gave German music fans the cut marks they wanted.

Quicker data-transfer rates give rise to a radio boom online

If the only way to broadcast music in the post-internet era, excluding a few private radio stations, were via illegal pirate radio stations, then the Internet would have made hobby radio stations just about obsolete. Just about every private, hobby radio station could be set up with the right software and equipment after paying registration fees where required. Thanks to the Internet, the once horrible quality of hobby radio stations, which you could only tune into with a world receiver, has been replaced by the digital quality that has become the norm today.

An old legal principle reinterpreted for modern times

In 2004, the RapidSolution Software AG started developing the initial versions of Radiotracker. In early 2005, Radiotracker was made available to the public at http://radiotracker.com and was made for Windows XP. With over 6,000 Internet radio stations and the “Autorip” function, anyone could easily record music straight from Internet radio stations – the routine being select genre, click the start button, wait a bit and voila! Depending on the bandwidth, Radiotracker provided you with thousands of mp3 files from any given music genre. The later versions improved on their predecessor by fully automating the music recording functions and topping everything off with ID3 tags, album artwork and lyrics.

Wish lists, MusicFinder and lots of hits

The Radiotracker Platinum version provided the international breakthrough in 2006 and 2007. Even today, Radiotracker Platinum is the only music software in the world that has a catalog of several tens of thousands of artists and their songs. The huge international network of Radiotracker users enables radio stations playing any of the artists in the catalog to be found and recorded automatically. The competitor’s software attempted to copy this principle by using a filter function, but because there was neither a comparable catalog, nor a user network nor a similar editing function, the competition’s products were never successful and became increasingly obscure. After several more than positive mentions in international trade publications, Radiotracker 4 made it on the cover of the German computer trade publication Magazin PCpraxis in November of 2007 with the headline “22.500 Gratis MP3 täglich” (22,500 free mp3s daily). The headline hitting the proverbial nail on the head as Radiotracker 4 did indeed possess the unique capability to download tons of music from your favorite genre free of charge and completely legal. Later in the same month, Radiotracker replaced the one time market leader Klassenprimus atop the European “best of” list according to the leading German computer trade magazine ComputerBild.