Before the days of digital music, one way to build a compilation of your favourite new songs was to tape them directly from the radio onto audio cassette. It was hardly an ideal solution, and something that would have been far easier if we'd had something like Intempo's Rebel to hand.

At heart it's simply a portable FM radio but it carries a couple of unique features to help you quickly build a large collection of music on the cheap. Once tuned to a station, the Rebel automatically starts recording the broadcast to its internal storage, which can hold up to a maximum of 40 songs in 192kbps MP3 format. When this limit is reached it'll start overwriting the ones that are stored, so is constantly updating itself with new music.

What's most impressive is that general radio chatter and adverts are automatically detected and ignored, though the device requires you to be tuned into a station for a minimum of 12 hours to start recording at optimum levels, with 36 hours recommended before it adequately 'learns' the station to effectively separate songs from speech. It's also capable of identifying and skipping songs that have already been recorded so as not to double-up.

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We left it going for a few days and did notice that it appeared to get more efficient at cutting out DJ chatter before and after tunes, though due to the nature of radio broadcasting this does mean that you rarely get a single track in its entirety; in most cases the first ten seconds or so was missing and in some instances a song began around 30 seconds in. It's not perfect, then, but we were still impressed by its ability to build a varied collection of music pretty quickly.

Once you have some tracks recorded you can transfer them to USB storage or memory card via the multi-card reader or even directly to an MP3 player, mobile phone or iPod. Each transfer process works really well, though with some mobile phones you may need to set access to 'USB storage' or equivalent in order to start the process. The iPod method is slightly trickier and involves you copying a collection of 'empty' tracks (which are supplied on CD along with instructions) via iTunes so that they're in your player's library when you connect it to the Rebel.

If you have internal storage connected while the device is recording it effectively ups the capacity, allowing you to increase the 40-track limit. You can also connect external analogue or digital audio devices to the line-in port on the back and have the Rebel record from these, which may come in handy if you have a portable Internet radio you'd like to grab tunes from.

Aside from the fact that you have to wait a while to build a collection, we were impressed by how quick and easy the Intempo was to use, and how simple it is to transfer its contents onto other devices. While we can't see it appealing to the mass market, if you're a bit of a radio nut and would enjoy building a music collection in this way you'll find it to be highly effective. Audio quality is good, the additional features give it some added flexibility and, aside from issues with incomplete tracks, we were impressed by its ability to build an MP3 collection with the minimum of fuss.