14 DAY TRIAL // Thousands of internet radio stations and many of them broadcast your favorite music. You can't hear them all at the same time, you can't record more than one song at a time...tough luck! Heck, no! Hit Recorder's here just for the job: up to 20 stations recorded at the same time, custom filter-triggered recording, encoding, podcasting, audio editing, library, ripping, CD/DVD burning, traffic control. Should I say more?
Hit recorder is one easy-to-use location for all the above features, all dedicated to have your legally-obtained music collection grow exponentially in just a matter of hours! You tell it what to do and Hit Recorder will save music you choose in your convenient wma, mp3 or ogg formats. Even without the need to listen to those radios!
The GUI
This all-in-one "radio recording suite" has a very simple, sober and yet stylish appearance. It can be skinned, but I liked very much the default iron-grey look. In the upper part of the window there are the very handy access buttons for various features you might want to use. The main window hides itself to the system tray as soon as you minimize it; and this is good!
The biggest area on the screen is occupied by the station list, a large table containing useful info on each station (provided the station has such data available). Controls for playback and recording, as well as a rotary volume-knob are featured at the bottom of the main window, providing easy access and excellent visibility. Right next there is another info pane displaying the station's name and the current track artists and song name.
Hit Recorder's general appearance looks very XP, with soft and sleek buttons and bars, well-drawn icons for each of its functions, all generating a very comforting operation. A careful designer application with a look that is close to a professional one.
The features
Besides playing a huge amount of radio stations worldwide, the Hit Recorder will help you search for your new favourite stations according to keywords, bitrates, genres and so on. Its main cool feature is the fact that you can set Hit Recorder to record music broadcast on the net depending on several rules YOU make. Whether it is about certain artists, song titles, or even certain weekday radio shows, the Hit Recorded is easy to set up.
After you filled in the required fields everything you have to do is leave the program running and connected to the internet. It will automatically trigger recording-mode whenever it meets one of the pre-specified criteria, at the same time building up your music library in a folder of your choice. Entering the library-mode allows you to playback songs the software has recorded and quickly go to editing them, be it a so-called "batch" editing or simple ID3 tagging.
Speaking about editing - as I mentioned before - the Hit Recorder has its own editing software. Nothing fancy, just the basic preset-based editing options such as normalize, fading, echoing/vibrato, all sorts of pass-filters. Also cut/to file and pasting options are available allowing the user to even create mixes from fav tracks.
CD burning is easy, made via an express-type interface with the very handy drag and drop integration which is very good! The latest applications I reviewed did not sport this feature (don't ask me why) and I am glad to finally meet one that does. Track arrangement on the CD is helped by UP/DOWN buttons that will move songs so the playlist fits your needs.
Podcasting has been made very easy and you can configure this section of Hit Recorder in just seconds, thus gaining access to the web resources in a very fast and simple way. CD ripping is also a fast process and its interface is easy to read/use even by those who don't know much about this operation. Be it an mp3 CBR/VBR format or ogg-vorbis or even wma, the Hit Recorder will quickly extract the content of an audio CD to you hard-drive in a short time.
One nice feature is "Music 2 Go" and it's a pane dedicated to copying music to your portable devices, whatever might they be: PSP, iPod, smartphone, even USB memory stick. The same drag and drop ease that combined with few clicks will send your favorite music to a portable device of your choice. Cool!
Other useful features are the Quick Recorder, a command that will record the current station broadcast for an interval varying from 5 minutes up to 90 minutes. Mass-stop, favorites and scheduler are also standard specs for the Hit Recorder.
The good
Because it's a dedicated application and also for the ease of use, the Hit Recorder gets one good point from me. For the possibility to do multiple recordings at the same time it gets more good marks. Automation by means of filters and scheduler that allows you not to stay there -physically present - trying all day to "catch" something you hope will go on air is also a strong feature.
The bad
It has no way to control the quality of the music; I mean no EQ is present. Not so good...because some stations might go on air with some low-quality tracks and then you can't do a thing. Later editing is not a helping hand because it consumes time and the Hit Recorder's editor has but some hi/lo pass filters. So you'd need another editor and so on.
The truth
An excellent buy for its price! Considering that the Hit Recorder lets you LEGALLY obtain music that's being used in an internet radio broadcast, the 16.41 USD you'd pay for this piece of code looks more like some sort of donation. It works fine and smoothly, easy to learn set up and control. Nice German production. My word: worthy!
