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.