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."

Comments

use a vcr

[zogger]

--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.

How bout a winamp plugin?

[Screaming Lunatic]

I listen to Internet radio stations all the time using xmms. A lot of college stations are available at shoutcast.com. It doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to write some sort of plugin for winamp that could do the job.

If the winamp plugin system won't do, how about heading over to the xmms dev mailing list and asking a few questions there.

This already exists...

[Thomas A. Anderson]

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!

NPR broadcasts in MP3

[JabberWokky]

I've long since set up a system so that my home system time shifts All Things Considered to when I can listen to it at night. Since I've been busy during weekends, I've been recently doing the same with much of the weekend line up on NPR.

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

FM Radio cards

[mcelrath]

None of the responses yet seem to have noticed the "antenna" part of your post. Anyway, there is ample support for FM radio cards in linux. Check out drivers/media/radio/* in the linux kernel tree. A number of the TV tuner cards can also tune in to FM. Now then, let's see.

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

I've done this.

[adolf]

I used to have a large rooftop antenna before I moved into this tin box/apartment, and had my own RadioTiVo.

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. :) Using an FM tuner card was always out of the question for reasons of noise and interference.

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.