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April 24, 2008

Chilirec Is Like TiVo for Internet Radio

Mark Hendrickson

29 comments »

Chilirec is a new Swedish music site found through Go2Web20 that extracts individual tracks from internet radio stations. It then lets you either play them back in the browser or download them as MP3 files for later use.

You start with Chilirec by choosing from a preselected set of a few hundred channels. Two downsides: you can’t load your own channels and you can’t listen to them normally before choosing to record. But once you to start recording, Chilirec will begin loading the songs into its Flash-based player so you can play them back at your convenience (somehow it knows just when songs begin and end, and which ones they are).

After you’ve built up a recorded collection, you can search through your songs using keywords that will match artists, titles and genres. You can also play recordings by channel, artist, and playlist. A “toplists” feature will presumably display the songs that are most popular across your selected channels, but it takes at least a day of recording to work.

If you want to play a song outside of Chilirec, you can click on an icon next to it and it will be saved as an MP3 on your desktop. It would be great to see them add a feature for bulk downloads in addition to the ability to load your own channels (for your local radio station, for example).

Chilirec is a nice tool for when you don’t know exactly which music you want to add to your collection. Other music search sites like Songza and Skreemr are better when you have an artist or song name in mind. And of course, Pandora and Jango are great for when you want to find music related to the stuff you already know you like.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Chilirec Is Like TiVo for Internet Radio « The-social-network.info’s Weblog

    April 24th, 2008 at 10:47 pm

  2. Chilirec - DVR your internet radio » ActionsTalk.com

    April 25th, 2008 at 9:08 am

  3. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » ChilirecはインターネットラジオのTiVo

    April 25th, 2008 at 9:17 am

  4. rebeculous blobulation » Blog Archive » Chilirec internet radio extractor

    April 28th, 2008 at 12:28 am

  5. Wuensch-Media.de

    May 14th, 2008 at 10:02 pm

Comments

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  1. Josh

    April 24th, 2008 at 5:42 pm

    I was going to do something just like the years ago, never got around to it. Shame on me!

  2. zell

    April 24th, 2008 at 5:44 pm

    how is this legal…?

  3. Igor The Troll

    April 24th, 2008 at 5:45 pm

    Good service! Is it free or they charge for this?

  4. Mark Hendrickson

    April 24th, 2008 at 5:45 pm

    Free…and questionably legal, like this whole category of services.

  5. Michael Arrington

    April 24th, 2008 at 5:48 pm

    {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/PbDqtvqRbU_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:” ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/qldN8njgBe”}}}

  6. Michael Arrington

    April 24th, 2008 at 5:49 pm

    no real question on legality :-)

  7. Ryan Hupfer

    April 24th, 2008 at 5:51 pm

    I’m going to try this one out - seems very cool. As for how legal it is…well, nothing says great press like a good old-fashioned lawsuit. I guess that if it’s worth going through the trouble to sue a product, it must be good enough to try out, right?

    That needs it’s own name - kind of like some type of startup street cred or something. 50 cent got shot 9 times….Chilirec gets sued 3 or 4 times. Both get more people interested in their product and services.

    Just remember to but a ‘lawsuit’ line item in your venture capital pitch.

  8. Ryan Hupfer

    April 24th, 2008 at 5:53 pm

    Mike - that dog looks like it can eat small toddlers.

  9. JasonH

    April 24th, 2008 at 6:47 pm

    I tried it out.

    *Great that you don’t even need to register to use it.
    *Registration is needed if you want to access the library you built from other Internet connected computers.
    *Does a pretty nice job of detecting the pause between tracks.
    *Downside, most tracks have the first couple of seconds of the next song. So, the technology isn’t perfect.
    *Upside, probably good enough for most people trying to rip MP3s to a CD for later listening.
    *I like the playlist/ITunes style.
    *They had my favorite Internet radio station, SomaFM.

    Overall - Best new app I’ve seen on TechCrunch in a while.

    I can see this site doing very well. That said, the barrier to entry seems low and copycats could arise. To counter that, something more proprietary needs to be developed despite their “patent-pending” recording technology. That, or have insane viral growth to become the early market leader.

  10. JWarren

    April 24th, 2008 at 6:51 pm

    Cool idea. I personally rather go with something like StationRipper, that just puts all the songs directly on my HD, but this is nice if you want to have access anywhere.

  11. JWarren

    April 24th, 2008 at 6:55 pm

    Looks like they are based in Sweden - so they might stay alive for a bit :)

    I do wonder about the storage for this thing - if they save seperate copies of each MP3, and if everything is recording every station, it seems like that would get big, quick…

  12. Martin Murphy

    April 24th, 2008 at 8:04 pm

    Great, another source of low quality mp3’s to try and avoid on imeem.

    So, if people download these mp3’s from ChilliRec and want to share them on imeem can you mention the source so that I can ignore them in favor of the versions sourced from CD’s

  13. AMIT

    April 24th, 2008 at 8:26 pm

    has anyone tried screamer radio ? screamer is based on the same idea only simpler …AND its been there for ages

  14. Duncan Riley

    April 24th, 2008 at 8:27 pm

    Mark
    Pandora is not great for the majority of the planet: it’s georetarded remember!
    On this service: nice. I wonder though if it won’t put more pressure on Amercian record companies to open up: notice how all the good stuff is coming from overseas now because they don’t have the RIAA and big music screwing them around

  15. Chris

    April 24th, 2008 at 9:11 pm

    If yahoo wants to be ‘friendly’ then it should stop treating its advertisers like assholes. I have been advertising online for 10 years and never have i dealt with such arrogant idiots as the people at yahoo. No matter what they do they will never get a dime from me again. They are wasting their time with this crap, and Jerry Yang needs to go back to whatever the hell he was doing before he started this useless website. Just my opinion. Take the MSFT offer fool, you are lucky to get that much.

  16. new idea auditing dept

    April 24th, 2008 at 9:42 pm

    Audiomill tried this in 2001 or 2002 but got shut off by the Internet radio stations that didn’t want to pay bandwidth costs for non-human listeners.

  17. John Noma

    April 25th, 2008 at 12:56 am

    I like this post. More of these great new startups on Techcrunch!

  18. marc

    April 25th, 2008 at 2:33 am

    Won’t use it until they add KROQ to their list of stations …

  19. reddknight

    April 25th, 2008 at 8:45 am

    At first I wondered why we needed something more than Pandora (or similar offerings). But I suppose it is good if it helps you find new music. I have not had any luck with recommendation algorithms–something about my tastes make them go horribly wrong.

  20. Daniel Brusilovsky

    April 25th, 2008 at 9:02 am

    I like this idea… but it brings the question again… is it legal.

  21. JasonCarr

    April 25th, 2008 at 1:05 pm

    I’m convinced that this is the best thing that there is.

  22. Ola

    April 26th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

    I’m sorry but I can’t help smiling at the question: is it legal? When I was a teenager we used to tape record music off the radio. The tapes where taxed by the government to pay the music industries for lost profit. I’ve heard Canada have the same taxation for CD’s (and hard drives?). The Radio stations pays a song tax.

    The rhetorical question would be: Has it ever been illegal to record form the radio for personal use. Not in Sweden but it sounds like it could be in the above countries. Well, I hope this explains the smile.

    I agree, this is one of the better ideas I have seen in a while. Since much of the music is pre-recorded. All they need is basically a few overlapping lines, a big hard drive and well the other usual stuff. Since the idea is so simple and they have a pending patent I guess they will have to fight for it.
    Now I think to pre-record can cause a problem - if they don’t pay for it - but to relay a music station that shouldn’t be a problem, as well as to save the songs.

    I would not be surprised it the Radio stations want Chilirec to pay since Chilirec will earn money on their service. The radio stations may also loose a few “add-reading” customer, but then on the other hand, they may gain some.

    And did I say, the service is great to save music off-line.

  23. Digelido...

    May 1st, 2008 at 10:49 am

    I can’t see why artist would not dig this. First they have there music played on the radio, then they have it published on the chilirec toplist. They first get paied to have there music played on the radio. Then they get there music played on the chilirec toplist where I even can see the artists name. If I like there music I might by there CD or go to a concert.

  24. buttless

    May 9th, 2008 at 12:49 pm

    If it had a way to publish your playlist to a website with a player it would be near perfect.

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