In a nutshell, iRATE downloads and plays music. You say how much you like each track that it gives to you, ranging from never play this again to I love it!. It will then compare your music tastes based on this against those of other people, and try to give you more music that you might like.
The music it downloads comes from the websites of artists who choose to freely give away their music, so there is no risk of copyright infringement happening.
Browse to http://www.irateradio.com/ then click on the pretty blue icon or the "Run iRATE Radio" link.
Using iRate Radio is easy -- just run the program and rate the new tracks as they are downloaded.
Rating tracks is a very important part of running iRate Radio, as this is what enables the program to learn what kinds of songs you like. The rating scale is pretty simple -- 0 (the trash can) means "never play this again," 4 means "I love it" and the remaining options let you select between these extremes. The "i" button tells you how long the track is and has a pop-up for searching for more info on the artist. The longer you use iRate Radio, the more it will learn from the ratings you made and the better it will be at selecting music you will like.
The Play controls in iRate Radio are very simple.
Tracks can be "dragged and dropped" onto, or out of, iRate. This is the easiest way save individual iRate tracks as MP3 files on disk. iRate tracks can also be dropped onto other media players like WinAmp or iTunes.
iRATE is normally configured using the "Settings" menu within the program, but curious users can see details of the configuration settings stored two XML-format configuration files. The iRATE system settings are stored in the file ~/irate/irate.xml, where "~" is your "home" directory. For Windows users, this would usually be "C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\irate\irate.xml".
Another XML configuration file in the same folder, "trackdatabase.xml", contains track information. A "download" folder within the "~\irate\" folder holds the mp3 tracks.
By default iRATE saves the downloaded songs under the user's "home" directory. If this disk starts to become too full, the dowload loacation can be changed without losing tracks that have already been downloaded.
In Linux you can just copy your download directory somewhere and turn the current download directory into a symbolic link that points to the new location. Easy. :)
In Windows, the following process can be used to move all the tracks to a larger drive:
1) Locate your current iRATE settings folder. The default location in Windows is "C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\irate\").
2) Create an 'irate' directory on the disk where you want to move the files.
3) Move the trackdatabase.xml file from your current settings folder to the new irate folder. Move the 'download' folder as well. Leave the irate.xml file where it is.
4) Update the 'downloadDir' in irate.xml to point at the relocated trackdatabase.xml
5) Make a backup copy of your trackdatabase.xml in case something gets messed up during the next step.
6) Open trackdatabase.xml with a text editor. Use the 'find and replace' function of the editor to replace all occurances of the old download path with the new download path. (The path is the 'file' property of the 'track' tags in XML)
For example, in Windows the path is normally something like: file="C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\irate\downloads\foo.mp3" Replace the "C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\" part with the path to the new download directory.
Now you should be able to download new files to that directory and listen to your old ones without losing any data.