Automatic selection, recording and meaningful labeling of clipped tracks from media without an advance schedule

Automatic selection, recording and meaningful labeling of tracks from media streams is provided. Content information which relates to tracks currently being played and/or to previously played tracks is used to guide selection of tracks to be recorded and to provide meaningful labels for recorded tracks. This content information does not provide an advance schedule of tracks to be played in the future. A segment is temporarily recorded from a selected media stream. The content information relating to tracks in the segment is compared with previous user input (i.e., track preferences) to select tracks within the segment to be recorded. For each selected track, clipping is performed to identify track start and end times. Clipped tracks are recorded onto a suitable long-term recording medium, and labeled with a meaningful label derived from the content information. Content information can be derived by automatic analysis of the media stream.