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Sony's New Bookshelf MP3 Player -- Audio TiVo?
Betelgeuse writes: "The NY Times has a story story about a new bookshelf MP3/CD player from Sony. Every time you play a CD, the machine automatically copies its tracks onto its built-in 20-gigabyte hard drive. It will then try to get album track information off the CD or, alternately, you can use the PC link to get titles off your favorite cddb-like site." As the article puts it, they've come up with "the world's first TiVo for radio." Long overdue -- I only wish it used a format that was closer to standard, and let you pull tracks to other media. Update: 07/11 18:17 GMT by T : Ooops -- messed up that link, now fixed.
the world's first TiVo for radio
It creates MP3s from CDs that you play, not from the radio.
The revolution will be televised. Blackout restrictions apply.
From the article:
(The L7HD stores audio in Sony's own Atrac3 format rather than the more common MP3 format. But since you can copy music only onto the hard drive, never off it, the storage format makes no practical difference.)
If you read down in the article it does say 'CD and Radio'. No more missing your talk radio show!
What's so special about Sony's device? My Request ARQ1 (http://www.request.com) that I've had for 18 months does everything this device seems to do. Additionally, it's got a built in webserver, streaming capabilities, SMB sharing, and no crap ass DRM.
The title is misleading. This is not an MP3 player. The songs are stored in Sony's own format.
Also, this device can copy from any audio source, digital or analog. That means CDs, tapes, radio and even your PC (when it is playing music).
Sony has not attempted to build CD to MP3 ripper/player. This is a digital jukebox very similar in concept to TiVo.
All your favorite sites in one place!
This Sony products sounds very similar to the RioCentral from SonicBlue. The RioCentral rips a CD that you insert, grabs cd track info from cddb, and stores on 40GB drive in mp3 format. It has USB ports for connecting your portable MP3 player, and you can connect it to the rest of your network with the ethernet port. A feature it has over the Sony model is that it can also burn CDs that you mix. You can also transfer files to and from the unit over the network. The only feature sony seems to have on this guy is the ability to tune to radio stations.
Check out "Oscar" -- do a google search. It is exactly this type of unit and it is made for cars. You can even buy a kit and build it yourself, and yes it runs under Linux.
The build instructions were printed in a European electronics magazine last year or the year before. Sorry I can't be more specific.
You can use it at home, too. Why spend $1000 when somebody already did this?
If you use Linux or Windows, you have a TiVo for the radio now. See Linux Radio Timeshift HOWTO.
If you use Windows, try: Nowhere Man - Messer's Home Page.
There is probably something for the Mac, but I wouldn't know.
Both solutions require that you have an external radio tuned to the station that you want or a Radio Card you can control from your OS. Unfortunately neither Windows or Linux is capable of waking up from a deep sleep via the computer's clock (this is ridiculous, somebody should fix this and offer a smarter computer/BIOS), so it isn't exactly the same as a VCR for the radio. But if you leave your computer on all the time anyway, it doesn't matter.
Dara Parsavand
And if you spend five minutes with Google, you discover that you can buy a usb fm tuner with recording software for about $10 on Ebay.
. ht m
http://www.dlink.com/products/usb/dsbr100/5out5
Note that when you buy a new Sony Minidisc recorder to record music on you minidisc....you can't upload that music to a different machine than the one used to record it.
SOny is doing everything to lock you down. Don't buy this ting. I have their Minidisc recorder, which is cool, but I can't transfer files from my work pc to my home one using the MD.