iRATE radio home - free and legal music

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iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering system for music. You rate the tracks it downloads and the server uses your ratings and other people's to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music.

iRATE radio does:	allow you to discover, download and listen to music. use the ratings of users with similar tastes to you to recommend tracks. work like a streaming audio site, but uses less bandwidth and more control. use only volunteer slave labour.
doesn't:	work like or interoperate with Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, Donkey or The Sims. allow others to access anything on your computer or any information you send to the server. play the same music that you hear on the radio and TV. contain spyware, adverts or other unfriendly features. cost any money.

If you have a problem or a suggestion then try one of these mechanisms:

Feel free to email me at ajones@clear.net.nz if you want to contact me about any other matter.

Mailing list

Subscribe to the announce mailing list to get updates on iRATE. If you want to contibute or just have your finger on the pulse then add yourself to the development mailing list.

News

29 July 2004 - I've been a little snowed under lately. iRATE has still been slowly progressing. The Mac release has been updated. Many of the translations have been updated and there are now separate French and French Canadian translations.

We also got a mention on a French web site. Of course I had to get it translated it into English so I could understand it.

15 June 2004 - We've been making more progress in the last month. Steve's been working on a volume normalisation plug in. I've been fixing problems with the skinning code. In the last week or so I've been fixing some of the bugs which are specific to the Windows platform. Sebastian has updated the German translation and the Spanish translations are also in the process of being updated.

18 May 2004 - Matt Weirauch made a liar of me by living in Santa Cruz and reading this web page. However I don't think he actually went to see Frontalot. I've added his band to iRATE though.

5 May 2004 - The world's 579th-greatest rapper MC Frontalot is playing live at Berkley. I thought I'd mention it dispite it being statistically improbable that someone reading this page actually lives near enough to go.

4 May 2004 - I've done the alpha blending for the table items. I've generated a screen shot. They still don't look prefect but I'm starting to reach the limit of what is possible without jumping through too many hoops.

3 May 2004 - Still making slow but sure progress. Anyone using the unstable release will have seen some of the recent improvements. Yes. I already said it was slow but things are still moving along steadily. SWT doesn't have proper support for transparency so we've had to do a lot of it the hard way by merging images and stuff.

I've recently been listening to an Aussie Hiphop band from Adelaide called Hilltop Hoods. They've got a video available for anyone who is interested in that kind of music. It's good to see that bands are putting watchable videos onto the net (it isn't fantastic quality).

24 April 2004 - This week has been a busy week for iRATE with both Chris and myself working on the skins. I've also added licensing support to clearly identify Creative Commons licensed works. One of main advantages of CC licensed works is the permission to redistribute the works. This means you can write them on a CD and give them to your friend without risk infringing copyright. Thanks to Magnatune we now have over 3,000 CC licensed tracks. We also got a mention on the Creative Commons web site.

16 April 2004 - Easter was a chance to catch up on a few bits and pieces. Over the break Taras wrote code to allow iRATE to download more than one track at a time. Judd, Chris and I have been working on trying to make iRATE more pretty but still don't have anything for show and tell yet.

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