Slashdot Mirror
TiVo-Like Devices for Radio?
crank asks: "I've recently hoisted an antenna high upon my roof, since I'm bored with listening to the mega-watt corporate radio stations and instead and enjoying great, niche college and NPR stations. What I need is some sort of TiVo-like radio device, which will tune to the appropriate radio station and record to the hard drive (ideally to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis formats). Then, I could dump these to one of the many portable devices or stream from a computer for later listening. This is especially important with stations that change format frequently throughout the day, such as KFJC. Any suggestions? I think the tricky part would be integration of the FM tuner. I've had limited success with leaving the radio station pre-tuned to the station I want to tape, but I'd like something smarter that would power up, capture the program, and then power down."
I don't know of any tools for it, but I have some ideas on putting yourself one together.
There are numerous devices that can get you a tuner on your computer. Many Hauppauge TV-Tuner boards work quite well, and as they are the BT878 chip, run well under linux. D-Link sells a USB-based tuner.
With that and some perl and encoder software, you should be able to slap something together. Cron could be helpful.
Use command line tools if possible. Something that records to WAV would work, you could call it from AT. Then call your mp3 ripper to translate it, then delete the file. I'd use a digital stereo reciever (Radio Snatch Optimus) so I didn't get any drift in the FM tuner, plug it into the Line In port on your sound card.
--just use a vcr, it will record audio only just fine, have timers, and can do up to 8 hours worth on EP, then dump it at your leisure to your computer using whatever compression you want and audio in jack.
alternatively, there are several radios with built in cassette decks that will record on a timer basis. I just hit google on it, tons of hits, several brands and models.
ultra engineering geek, get a programmable thermostat and mod and hack away.
never owned a tivo, but won't it work on an audio input? or does it require secret hidden signals to work? No idea on that really.
It's called streamripper and you can find it here.
It runs on win9x, *nix, and OS X. I found it yesterday after reading an article on sfgate.com.
I've been using is since yesterday - works great!
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
The nice thing is that, for NPR at least and most college stations - the ones you say you're interested in, it's easy - they all broadcast MP3 streams which can be nabbed with a simple mpg123 -s url >file.mp3 &, and then sleep 3720; killall mpg123. At that point, you're a simple cronjob away from being done (I start one minute early, end one minute late).
One amusing sidenote - I moved cross country this year, and I now live in an area with a lousy NPR station. I now listen to WUNC in North Carolina, a few thousand miles away, and gave to them during pledge drive. Hell, they played Heather Alexander on thier local music show. Anybody who plays filk is ok in my book.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
There's also ShoutGrab for recording MP3 streams:
http://ostermiller.org/shoutgrab/
Look here for the Streambox VCR program. It's great for both video and audio feeds. Of course, you'll note the disclaimer that it's illegal to use in the United States. *shrug*
Get a shareware windows program called Cybercorder. It records from your sound card in realtime in any format you want. Mp3, ogg, whatever codecs you have installed. It has a great timer system and way of keeping track of lists. Well worth paying for unless you want to spend a weekend dicking around with cron scripts and sketchy software.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Here is a list of radio tuner apps for linux and here's another. Also try googling for "linux FM radio tuner card". These apps, along with a sound card (depending on what kind of FM tuner you get) and oggenc/lame and a little scripting (hint: cron job), and you should be in business.
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
The linux driver is dsbr100.c. It's already installed with my copy of readhat.
Use fmio to tune the device, sox to grab the stream, lame to encode it and cron to orchestrate the whole thing.
I used to have a large rooftop antenna before I moved into this tin box/apartment, and had my own RadioTiVo.
:) Using an FM tuner card was always out of the question for reasons of noise and interference.
It wasn't at all difficult, though I did spend way too much time optimizing the commandline for LAME and setting levels correctly. I just put a YMF724-based sound card into my headless, does-everything FreeBSD box, plugged it into a 1980s-vintage standalone Kenwood digital tuner (find something similar at a pawnshop or Ebay), and made some cron jobs to run things. The 724 was nice because its ADC stage generally sounded very good, and it had a loopback mode that it could be massaged into which would let you hear immediately if you had clipped the input.
The box, a K6-2 350, isn't quite fast enough to do VBR MP3 encoding in realtime, and I was dead-set on VBR. So, I had it record the entire program as standard 44.1KHz 16-bit PCM, and then run a nice'd encode process on the file after the radio program had finished.
Sometimes, usually on the weekends, this meant that 2 or 3 processes of LAME were running at a time trying to catch up. Not that FreeBSD ever broke a sweat...
It ran extremely reliably, and with an NTP-synced clock, the start- and stop-times were consistantly dead on.
Every few months, I'd burn a CD or two of Car Talk for archiving and nuke whatever was left over.
Of course, there was no way to change stations. I considered briefly the notion of building a machine from mindstorms that would push the radio's preset buttons, but then I realized that nothing but NPR had any programming which I actually wanted to listen to.
Hint: Use lame's lowpass filter to cut everything above 15KHz. There's nothing there but noise with commercial FM broadcasts, which are already band-limited to 15KHz anyway per FCC rules. That said, resist the temptation to use a 32KHz sampling rate and stick with 44.1. It's what the Nyquist filters and samplerate converters in consumer gear are optimized to work with, and makes burning audio CDs easier. These translate to better sound, overall.
Good luck.
Kid-proof tablet..
I just hadda point this out cuz its way different from what everyone is thinkin.alls you need is a nice stereo to record from thats digital and works with a remote and get a programmable remote with timer functions. I have a remote from all for one and its got an backlit LCD display and i can set it to press any button at anytime on anyday. Like say i wanted the tv to turn on at 6am, turn on the vcr, change to channel 32, record for 30 mins, shut off, and change the tv over to video2, thats no problem, and its damn easy and intuitive to setup and use.
There are some talk radio shows broadcast on AM that I'd like to listen to. However, they're broadcast during the day, and I can't listen to them while I'm at work, so I was in a similar situation.
Unfortunately, none of the PC tuner cards have AM tuners on them, only FM. Makes sense, since my computer equipment seems to generate a lot of interference on the AM frequencies. So, what I ended up doing was buying a GE SuperRadio III and a long headphone extension cord so that I could keep the radio in a separate room and minimize the interference.
Since I'm only running Win2K at the moment, I bought Total Recorder for US$12, which lets me make timed recordings in just about any format. (Unfortunately, no VBR for MP3, though, so I record to WAV and then convert using LAME.)
Using the "--present mw-us" flag with LAME, I can compress a three hour show down to 51.5 MB. A full week of both my favorite shows fits nicely on a CD for archiving or sharing.
SW radios like the Sony ICF-SW1000T can be programmed to tune a specific frequency at a specific time, and record to cassette tapes, much like a VCR. It should not be too hard to substitute an MP3 recording program in place of the cassette recorder.
SW users have been doing this for years, they are the people you should be consulting.
My local (and favorite) College Radio station actually keeps an archive of all their shows for the past two weeks on their web site. I dont know if yours does this, but its really great. If i miss a show i often download it and stick it on a cd tolisten to it during the blues drive or some other show that i'm less than enthusiastic about. Another bonus is that you can back it up and catch the name of the artists from the DJ.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Total Recorder for Windows is excellent and inexpensive software to do this. I have an old Sony FM tuner/amp connected to the line-in on my Sound Blaster Live. Total Recorder does scheduled recordings straight to MP3 from the line in. It does this with the line-in muted so I can listen to MP3's, play games, whatever while it's recording radio from the line-in. I wrote a small app to rename the MP3 files from my own radio show listings file. I record at 64K so one hour of radio is about 28 meg. I use MP3Splitter to split the one hour MP3 file into 30 pieces of two minutes each. I edit out commercials and/or NPR newsbreaks and then copy to my MP3 player or burn on to audio CD. The splitting is a big convenience since most MP3/CD players were made to play 3 minute pop songs, not hour long radio shows.
Total Recorder is available from http://HighCriteria.com is $12 for the basic version and $35 for the advanced version. I use the basic version. The advanced version now has better automatic file naming, stream recording, etc.
MP3Splitter is from http://www.codevisions.de. It's lacking in command line options, but I use the defaults and the shell extension "Quick Splitter" from the right click in Win Explorer to minimize input. Their download seems to be down right now. Try left menu "Downloads" then choose mirrors. Here is a working download link:
http://hj.dusnet.de/codevisions/mp3splitter.zip
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the CC Radio VersaCorder. It's not digital, but it does record FM and AM shows. You tell it the time and it records at 1/4 speed, so you can record those 3 or 4 hours shows on one side. And if you want to listen to it on the go, you use the player which plays the 1/4 speed tapes. It is not digital and it doesn't have a built-in tuner, but hook it up to a radio, or any other device, like a phone to record conversations. C. Crane makes many different products for radios so you might want to take a look at their .
I've been doing this for quite some time now with my Hauppage TV/FM tuner card, but you have to schedule so many events for each show that it becomes a real pain:
:(
-- First you have to schedule an event to kill any radio processes currently running.
-- Then you have to schedule a process to start the tuner on the station you need.
-- Then you have to start recording. I've yet to find a utility which will record at a specified time with no user interaction which is both free and runs on Windows. The "Absolute MP3 Player" is the closest thing I've found requiring you to only click a button. But you have to add your schedule to it too! And you don't get to tell it where to put the MP3's.
-- Then you have to stop recording.
-- Then kill the tuner app.
Worst of all, you have to listen to what's being recorded. There may be a solution for Linux, but unless you're ready to move your tuner card off your Windows box, there isn't a solution for Windows that works very well.
If you plan to change the schedule often, then my advice would be to forget about it, or start developing your own.
I submitted this exact same question several months ago but was rejected
Using the 'fm' utility from fmtools, my script tunes to the proper FM station and sets the volume.
Then I call SoX to grab the output stream in WAV format from the soundcard, and pipe it through to lame, which turns it into a mp3 in realtime (takes about 40% CPU time on my 1GHz P3).
The command looks something like this:
Put all that together in a script that's called by at or cron, and you're in business!
Try using Messer. It works with any audio source, and we have used it for broadcast recording and Audio Book production. Despite its somewhat quirky user interface, it works very well and allows you to schedule recordings. Unfortunately, the source is not available, and it is Windows only.
http://www.dago.pmp.com.pl/messer/
A cool stand-alone hardware solution that's not quite a radio TiVo (but close) is the Radio Program Recorder (RPR) (http://www.radioprogramrecorder.com). You can set it to automatically record any AM or FM talk show in your area. It has an AM/FM radio, a Sony digital recorder, and an FM transmitter (a wireless audio link to nearby FM radios) in a neat case that is smaller than a portable CD player.
The model RPR-X340 (5.6 hour capacity) has a USB link and software for uploading a recorded broadcast talk radio show from the recorder to your computer. You can also translate audio files from the computer to the recorder for listening on the go.
You can leave the RPR in your car while you're at work and it will record your favorite talk show. When you get in the car to go home you can listen to the show through your car radio just as if it were on at that time. You can also remove the tiny recorder and put it in your pocket for listening while on a walk or jog.