I have seen the future, peeps, and have only two words to say – streaming music recorders. [huh? -Ed]. That’s right, a world where music is shared via internet radio rather than files. Sure it’s more cumbersome, but it appears to be at least as legal as listening and recording off the radiowaves.

We’ve talked about the genre before, with Station Ripper, but Bill of Applian just sent me their new Replay Music proggie, and while it still has a few V.1 glitches, it’s very cool. Key feature is the ability to record music streams off a variety of Net radio stations while saving the tracks to individual files.

It’s only single stream right now, and Applian has decided to go with a Moodlogic licence for the tagging, which means you need to re-purchase the program every 1000 tracks (which I calculate is around 60 hours of music), but it’s a great start. And I’m certain that there’ll be a nice lot of free and commercial competitive products along in just a while. The $19.95 software will also automatically burn a CD once you have accumulated enough material.

‘Replay Music is a revolutionary new way to capture online music into individual MP3 files. Just play music from your favorite online radio station or streaming music service, and every song is saved on your PC as a high quality MP3 file, tagged with the artist and track name, and perfectly separated into individual tracks.

You can even burn songs directly to CDs. It’s a great way to discover new music!…Besides just recording and tagging, each MP3 file contains the entire song — no more, no less. Other recording programs may chop off the start or end of the song, or add unwanted noise.’