5 February 2004 Perth, Western Australia

New Zealander Anthony Jones announced the third minor release of the iRATE r
adio
client today. iRATE radio provides users with a powerful new way to find and
download free, legal music online. Users rate tracks based on their tastes. 
The
iRATE server then selects other tracks to send to the user from a database o
f
over 50,000 freely downloadable songs by correlating the user's ratings with
other users and finding people with similar tastes.

Unlike streaming audio, iRATE saves the tracks to the user's hard drive. Thi
s
means that playback is smoother, without the typical problems associated wit
h
streaming media, such as high bandwidth usage.

iRATE radio is written in Java, and is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac
 OS X.

For Debian i386, there is a package for woody that requires libmotif from
non-free, and there is another package for Sarge or Sid that doesn't have an
y
non-free dependencies.  iRATE itself is free software, licensed under the GP
L,
for both client at server.


deb http://members.westnet.com.au/takahe/debian/stable woody main
deb http://members.westnet.com.au/takahe/debian/stable sarge main

Windows users can easily get up and running with iRATE radio using Sun's Jav
a
Web Start and Internet Explorer. For other browsers on Windows and Linux, us
ers
may need to download and install Java WebStart separately. There are also na
tive
Debian, Mandrake, and Redhat Linux packages available. Mac users will be ple
ased
to hear that a disk image (.DMG) file for OS X will be released within a wee
k.

This release features a new, more intuitive user interface, a refined track
selection algorithm, and better download performance. Other improvements inc
lude
a new icon (following the recent icon contest), tool tips, ID3 tag display,
artist's website link support, playlist management, and many others.

Since the project's registration at SourceForge in March 2003, iRATE radio h
as
gathered an increasing number of developers. The user base now numbers over
8,000 individuals. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. Jones
recently made an announcement to the development mailing list detailing thir
teen
focus areas for improvement. These included translations, native playback (f
or
improved decoding performance), better server-side track selection, multimed
ia
key binding support, audio prompting, more publicity, and several others.

The iRATE radio website is at http://irate.sourceforge.net/
--
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

"I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak
out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared,
be in doubt, but don't be gagged."
-- John J. Chapman, "Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations"
http://www.goingware.com/reputation/


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