Downloading music off the Internet has become a bit of a minefield in recent years, with sites appearing and disappearing at a bewildering rate due to the often confusing laws governing copyright. With the huge surge in MP3 players, IPods and mobile phones that can store and play back vast quantities of tracks, there has never been a greater demand for music on the go.

Avanquest's Radiotracker software has now reached its fourth incarnation and is designed to take the pain out of the whole music download process. Once the program is installed, you are presented with three basic menus to help you decide how to define your searches and, once the downloads begin, you can then catalogue, edit and pass them on to your music-playing device.

In the main Radio menu you can choose from 77 music genres, then activate Autorip to start recording MP3 tracks automatically and in parallel from as many Internet broadcasters as it can, given your available Internet bandwidth. You can limit the number of stations to search from 1 to 100 at any one time and you'll be hard pushed to run out of alternatives as Radiotracker has over 15,000 Web radio stations in its database.

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The MusicFinder menu will then target all the artists on your wish list and continue to search for more of their tracks, either from your currently chosen performers or from the software's own extensive catalogue of 100,000 musicians. In addition, you can then go to the Radiotracker site and share your list of favourites with other users and keep in touch with current music trends.

The third menu handles Podcasts, where again you can search for a particular genre. When it comes to organising your growing music collection, they can be catalogued via artist or genre and the sound studio automatically edits out annoying adverts and dialogue. Further filters can be put in place to make sure you don't duplicate existing tracks and, whilst downloading, every track gives details of the album cover, release date, lyrics and ID3 tags.

Once complete, it's then simply a matter of clicking on the relevant button to copy the tracks to MP3 player or mobile phone or burn to CD. There's even a handy edit function that will let you create ringtones from the downloaded tracks. In short, you have no excuse now not to load up your player with hundreds of your favourite selections, effortlessly.

It's hard to imagine a cheaper, more effective and more comprehensive way of downloading your favourite MP3 tracks and Podcasts than this stunning little gem from Avanquest.