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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."
Trying to rig the million dollar give-aways, I see :). Good luck.
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.
If the winamp plugin system won't do, how about heading over to the xmms dev mailing list and asking a few questions there.
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)
I've used their site from time to time and wish it was easier to navigate. I also tend to get confused what is local content and what is national; because I'm in Washington, a lot of what seems local is actually syndicated everywhere. So it can be difficult to track down the file you need. But complain -- who me? It's free.
Hmm, I see they're a little slow to pick up the Illinois death penalty pardons story on their web page -- though I did hear it on the air as fast as anyone else had the story. (No, this isn't an invitation for anyone's views on the DP -- it's just a major breaking story.)
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
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..
How many different stations do you want to record?
I've been thinking about doing something similar, but I only have 2 stations I want to record off of, which is convenient since my soundcard has 2 inputs. My plan is to get 2 cheap radios with line out and tune each to one of the stations, hook each to one of my line ins, and set up cron jobs to record the shows I want. Seems pretty simple to me.
If I really wanted the radios to be powered down when I'm not recording I could hook theirpower up to relays also controlled by the cron jobs.
I'm sure there are more elegant solutions, but I don't really care that much since this whole assembly will just be stuffed in a closet with my server.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Not that this helps you at all in the land of 'we don't use the technology everyone else in the world uses' but the Psion WaveFinder http://www.wavefinder.co.uk/intro.asp can be used in conjunction with http://www.dabbar.co.uk/dabbar.htm and DigiGuide http://www.digiguide.com/ to set up and record programs to MP2 or MP3 files.
DigiGuide is a pay service (something like 5 pounds a year for all TV and radio listing) - you don't need this if you want to set up the time and channel to record manually, but with DigiGuide (and a free 3rd party add on the details of which I forget) you can click on the listings and it will add them to the recording.
Unfortunately the main downsides are that WaveFinders are now only available 2nd hand (e.g. on eBay) and that the software for them only works on Windows (works best on 98) and they are somewhat flakey. There are now new DAB cards for about 100 pounds which are hopefully better behaved, but I don't know what software there is for them.
Nonetheless I am hopeful that fairly soon this will all work properly.
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."
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!
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.