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When Internet radio first hit the web it was about as easy on the ears as a Slipknot album. Nowadays, thanks to the wider availability of broadband links, many stations transmit crystal-clear audio that sounds as good as and sometimes better than FM stations.

In fact, Internet radio has many benefits over boring old FM radio. There are thousands of stations and most of them transmit artist and song title information as part of the stream. So if you hear something you like you can quickly jot down the name and head down to your local record shop to buy a copy - or see if it's available on the iTunes Music Store.

However, there's one area where Internet radio isn't quite as friendly as analogue FM. If you want to record a show from FM radio, all you have to do is bung a tape in your cassette deck and press the red record button. However, Internet radio stations don't want you to be able to record their streams - the save button is always disabled. You could record the analogue feed from your Mac's audio output, but it's not exactly a convenient solution to the problem.

Luckily, independent software developers have come up with third-party applications that can take these Internet radio streams and save them directly to disk. In fact, many of them can record multiple different streams at the same time and some can even split the tracks into individual files.

One of the best pieces of software for this task is RadioLover a company

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called Bitcartel, and you can download a demo version of the software from www.bitcartel.com. Before recording everything you hear online, be aware that many audio streams are copyright-protected and you'll be breaking the law by downloading them.

Recording non-shoutcast streams

RadioLover is an excellent program for recording Shoutcast streams, as it can split the streams into individual tracks and save them in separate audio files. However, it doesn't support other formats such as RealAudio or Windows Media Audio.

Luckily, there are plenty of applications around that can record streams in these formats. Two of the best known are Audio Hijack and WireTap.

WireTap is a free application and doesn't feature as many bells and whistles as Audio Hijack. It records all the audio going to your Mac's sound port and so you have to be careful that no system sounds or other errant noises get into your recorded stream.

Audio Hijack, on the other hand, is clever enough to allow you to pinpoint exactly which application you want to record audio from, so you should never end up with system sounds in your recorded audio.

The standard version of Audio Hijack records sound data as raw, uncompressed Aiff files. Although these can be converted into MP3 format using iTunes, this doesn't happen in real time. If you want real-time encoding to MP3, you'll need the Pro version. The standard version of Audio HiJack costs $16; the Pro version is available for $30. The software has a few other tricks up its sleeve. Because it can intercept audio before it gets to your Mac's audio ports, it can add some sonic processing to it. So you can, for example, use it to add EQ to audio coming from games. In fact, there are a number of different audio processing tools built into Audio Hijack, and you can even add more as plug-ins to the Pro version.