Avanquest Audials One 2018
Taking you back to the days of home-made mixtapes. $59.90 | WWW.AVANQUEST.COM
Audials One is an affordably-priced program for streaming and recording audio from online radio stations. Covering music, podcasts and other broadcasts, it offers a wide variety of local Australian and international stations in its database.
While it’s OK to record from radio stations for personal use in most countries, you have to be careful how you use it. In Australia, you can technically only use sound recordings for educational or research purposes and the copyright remains the ownership of the author.
The nature of Audials One — hunting for specific tracks and artists in a vast sea of stations — means it lives and dies by the quality of its search, and thankfully, it performs admirably. You can either download many songs immediately via sites like YouTube and Vimeo, or add them to a wishlist so Audials records them as soon as they’re played on a radio station (which generally results in better audio quality). That wishlist lets you specify that you’re looking for regular audio files, music videos or karaoke versions, and the app has customisable download settings (including speed and number of downloads to run in parallel). It’s an excellent system — just set up your lists, click Activate and leave Audials to do its thing.
Because it’s based around radio stations, Audials One is also a great way to discover new music by artists who might have otherwise slipped under your radar. Listen to a track by one of your favourite performers, then see what else the station has to offer. Searching for an artist or song will also provide a list of stations that plays them regularly. You can browse stations by genre and location, which is a welcome touch, and when you select an artist, other performers will appear in a mind-map style diagram. The principle makes sense, but unfortunately the graphics don’t look great and often don’t scale well for different screen sizes.
There’s a great built-in file converter that deals with all the most common audio and video types without issue, including special audiobook formats, which is a feature you don’t see often enough.
All in all, Audials One has the potential to be great, but it’s let down a little by an overly complicated interface that can be a bit of a barrier between you and the radio stations you want. Otherwise, it’s excellent.