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TiVo For Radio?
An anonymous reader points out this Wired story that says "several electronics makers are releasing new products that promise to do for radio what the TiVo digital video recorder has done for television." (Products that might seem puny to serious time-shifting radio listeners, but cool to see them anyhow.)
I can only imagine this would be useful for talk radio... I mean... what would be the point of using this for a top 40 station?
evil adrian
the iTunes Music Store? listen to just what you want without to fuss of commericals?
move along....
And the point of time-shifting radio is????
I've been waiting all day for an article to spout off about and still, nothing. It's Monday! Isn't there a Microsoft bug to report? Isn't there any news on the Patriot Act 2? All this anger and frustration being pent up so long can't be good!
Oh, third post anyway.
With the size of sound files compared to video, you can probably store LOTS of recorderd time Days, maybe?
And if it could recieve on multiple freequencies at once (at least two), would be ideal.
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
This is great! Now I can record Casey Casum's Weekly Top 40 each week so I can listen to it at my leisure! Those songs rarely air on normal radio.
A one-frequency radio recorder could be done with a one line linux shell script. It would be utterly useless. Now, if a recorder could capture **MUCH** higher frequencies, would it be possible to capture a wider, higher range of the spectrum... say... a chunk of the FM band? This would be useful for analyzing radio communication later. I'd buy one of these in a heartbeat. (recording five or so preset frequencies would be better, but still not ideal.)
Isn't that called a Tape Recorder???? Seriously, a Tape is much better for this, and most radios have tape players builtin ANYWAYS.
I for one would be interested in this. There is a local public station that has a multitude of various radio shows featuring very different styles of music over the weekend. Often times, the shows that I want to hear are on very early or very late. For instance "Just Plain Folk" is on Saturday mornings between 7 and 9 am, while "DIY Radio" (punk rock) is on late Saturday evenings. It would be nice to schedule a "season pass" to these shows so that I could listen to them at my convenience. Granted, I'm certainly in the minority of radio listeners (most people only want to hear top 40), but I think that this product could have a nice niche market.
"Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling...." - Abraham Simpson
"If you had a friend who was interviewed on a news program and you sent him a copy of it, I think there's a pretty strong chance that would be considered fair use. On the other hand, if you taped all the top singles off the top 40 stations and sent it to all your friends that is more likely to be illegal."
Legality issues aside, I think that if I taped the "Top 40" and sent it to all my friends I'd find myself running out of friends very quickly...
If it even works close to this I'll be sure to have a full selection of Ani DiFranco and Liberace at my fingertips!
I need to timeshift Stern because the religious right here in Toronto got him canned from the Airwaves. And since he doesn't allow web casts. these radio TIvo's would be a godsend.
I went to battle MC Escher but drew a blank
I can't tell you how many times I've heard something and thought "gee, my girlfriend would be interested in that". However, neither of us listen to the radio except in our cars, so unless we're carpooling (which we can only do about 1/3 of the time), the other'd still pretty much be screwed even with a TiVO-like recorder.
Now, if I could park next to her can and wirelessly transfer the show, that'd be completely different. Maybe I could flag reports for her and have them automatically transfer when the cars are nearby... Of course, you'd have to do some pretty impressive interface work with this in order to keep everyone on the road...
Also, it'd have to work when the car was off without draining my battery (why is Science Friday on at such an odd time?)
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Actually, it is a nice idea. I can't wait to actually listen to music on the way to/from work instead of some insipid talk show.
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
"Sorry I'm late to work - I had my radio time-shifted by two hours and I thought it was 7am when I woke up"
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
It?s interesting to note that this is pretty much exactly what the RIAA was trying to stop internet radio from becoming. Who would have guessed that our old analog radios would have more sophisticated options than our internet radio?
And who are those "serious" time-shifting listeners today?
All you need is:= >A command to record it (say "sox -V -t ossdsp -c 2 -r 48000 /dev/dsp -t wav -c 2 -r 48000 /home/madmax/AUDIO/pipe1 & /home/madmax/AUDIO/pipe1 -o /home/madmax/AUDIO/history2.ogg")
==>A tuner card (say wintv FM)
==>A program to tune it (say gnomeradio - www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/gnomeradio)
=
oggenc -Q -q 6.5 -a "BBC Radio 2" -t "History of Psychedlia Part 2"
==>A command to stop it (say "killall sox")
==>And finally, at (see "man at"), to make it happen when u want.
All you ever need is a nice bit of unix/linux
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/10/10 53222&mode=thread
Ask, and ye shall receive...
I have crontab entries for the shows I like on my server... /usr/local/bin/rawrec -s 44100 -c 1 -t 1790 | BladeEnc -40 -rawfreq=44100 -rawmono stdin `date +%F-%H_%M_%S`.mp3
Works like a charm.
Why do you need this? Radio just plays the same 10 songs over and over anyways. If you miss a good song, just wait an hour or two, it'll be back on.
time shifting is a pretty tricky thing. for the brain to understand. The idea is that you can make something seemless by matching where something started from where it finished. My belief is that the visual cortex can identify the similarity of two pictures a lot faster then the mind can pick this up with sound. without the visual matching users are going to have a hell of a time doing a 30 second skip and picking up where they left off.
The thing also for me ( a personal preferance) is that all the shows I would get a season pass for are all online already (this american life and Rewind)
On the other hand this will be great for when NPR does their stupid 12 month long telefunding campaign.
ah well cook geeky toy.. Here comes Freevo with another module to add
It's about time they did this...
I've had my replaytv for almost 3 years and I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to instant-replay rewind the radio to hear something again. I doubt this'll be useful for prerecording shows (due to car battery drain of running all the time) but the live radio pause/rewind/ff features are mandatory. Plus, with only those features, there won't need to be a monthly fee, like Tivo Basic.
Suicide Booth: You are now dead! Thank you for using Stop and Drop, America's favorite since 2008.
Well,
fans of BBC radio will probaly already know that they do it for you. On their site they keep the last weeks worth of shows. And most of them are pretty good.
If anyone could tell me how to make it work in Linux, I'd be very very happy indeedly doodly.
I wouldn't buy one of these. I really see no point, for myself. In fact, I can't see that many consumers being interested in this. Once you go outside of the geek-world, even TiVo isn't that well-known. Now they expect to do it for radio...
Radio isn't big on the minds of the American public. It's thought of as 'been there, done that'. Take the lessons learned from satellite radio... people don't really care. If they did, why didn't satellite radio catch on like cable/satellite tv? Just because the idea of radio being free is too deeply ingrained?
Investing in consumer electronics can be pretty risky. The margins are tight, and not getting any better. Not to mention the fact that a poor economy is not a good place to be introducing new products.
Does anyone see the catching on? Does anyone think it will actually turn a profit?
Personally, I think some venture capitalists are about to take it in the butt on this one.
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
So I could listen to the music I wanted to hear when I wanted to hear it, without ads?
Funny, but I can pretty much do that now with my mp3 collection (however it may have been acquired, that's not the issue here).
Interesting to note, there has been a trend on college campuses (campii? ^_^) where instead of watching TV, we hit the local (blocked to the outside world) filesharing app where we can get ahold of prety much any episode of any show we'd want to see. No ads, no Tivo, just an intranet.
Now, in the "real world," where bandwidth is actually a limited resource, people limit their p2p activities mostly to music. I think the only reason Tivo survives is simply the fact that it isn't yet trivial to download television shows like it is for mp3s.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Cool, now i can archive The Howard Stern Show(s) along with the E! clips. >=]
Who needs TIVO for the radio when just about any worthwile programming is easily available anytime without commercials, except for the occasional ad from the national ketchup council?
I almost never listen to the radio. I might if I could essentially tivo it.
blah blah blah
Too bad Art Bell is no longer on the air. That's the only thing on the radio that would be worth recording.
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I hope you get this ad for the article.
Catch the Flugtag in your city.I bet these devices would be real useful in cars for commuters so they can get the news and music they want when they are driving to or from work. I know how annoying it is when your driving home and all you get to listen to for what seems like 10 mins is annoying commercials. Speaking of which, what kind of implications will this have on radio advertising? TV has ads that will run in the corner of the screen during programming eventually (maybe), but with radio all you can do is listen.
... for the same reason that I subscribed to eMusic for about 18 months. In this market, there is no decent music on the radio most hours of the day. I'd welcome the ability to easily time sift the few decent shows of the week to those hours when I'd like to have music on.
I emphasize "easily," because, in theory, I could use a tape deck to time shift, but that would be much more trouble than it's worth.
The RIAA would of course attempt to outlaw this before it was released, but it is a good study in fair use. I don't have a tape player (haven't since I left home for college years ago), and plugging my radio into my line in port would be a great way to listen to public radio whenever I want to, instead of having to miss Car Talk every week. because NPR is supported by your donations (well, mine, anyway) it's not stealing to record it and listen later, and you won't be fast forwarding through the commercials, unless it's time for their annual donation drive, of course. :)
This is the equivalent of "VCR for Radio", or a timer hooked up to a recorder. It's not integrated with a schedule.
People who have never used a Tivo might fail to see the distinction, but it's an important one. With Tivo, I don't have to know what time or channel something comes on - I just say "Record all episodes of the Simpsons" or "Record all movies directed by Stanley Kubrick", and it handles all the scheduling details for me.
These devices sound like you have to tell it to "at 10pm, tune to 101.3 and record for 30 minutes".
I have a PCI DAB radio card, DABBAR and EPGExplorer. I pick off the stations I want to record from the 7 day EPG, and come back to a directory of MP3 files ready to play or move to my iPod, and there's no nasty FM noise, just nice clean digital audio.
"You know you want me baby!" - Crow T Robot
webcast + streamripper + cron + shell script
Records 4 or 5 shows for me every week. I'm never around for Says You or On The Media, but thanks to KUOW's shoutcast 96k stream and a couple lines of shell scripting, I can listen anytime or put it on a portable player to listen to while working out.
Only trouble is, people look at you weird when you're grinning wryly while listening to Says You and using the elliptical trainer at the same time.
Can't wait to see what the RIAA has to say about these "criminals".
My biggest use of a TiVo-like feature for the radio would be to skip backward some amount of time to listen to snippets of a news/talk-radio show I was distracted from listening to the first time. I can't count the number of times that I've registered the tail end of an interesting story from NPR and wished I could go back to the beginning to listen to it again.
Uh oh.
How does it skip commericals exactly? The reason I ask is because on the radio sometimes they blend the commercial with another commercial at the end and then go right into a song. It isnt like TV where there is almost always cut and dry changes.
"With Tivo, I don't have to know what time or channel something comes on - I just say "Record all episodes of the Simpsons"
That is precisely why the networks hate Tivo (aside from the whole 'no ads' thing). They also lose their branding. It's no longer "The Simpsons on Fox", it's just "The Simpsons". Networks thrive in part by being recognized by their viewers and associated with certain shows and genres.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
And the 8 second jump-back can be repeated to the limit of the capture buffer (typically 30 minutes or a show boundary for TiVo). So if I were to get into the car 10 minutes into a 30-minute program and decide I wanted to listen from the beginning, I could do so.
As others have mentioned, there is a use for this product for talk and feature programs. I enjoy Car Talk and This American Life, among others, but their timing does not fit my schedule. I would get the device, but only if it were very cheap and easy.
The problem appears to be the lack of radio program guides. Judging from the article, these devices are more akin to an old VCR than to TiVo. TiVo's scheduling service provides one of its draws. I can search for episodes of the Simpsons without knowing ahead of time the channel and time. Radio schedules are not so widely published, however. There is no Radio Guide counterpart to TV Guide, nor do these products appear to have guides similar to TiVo's. Unless/until they add powerful scheduling features, I predict that their niche will remain quite small.
Do you think the radio stations are going to make a fuss about users skipping over commercials? To bring up another point, isn't this similar to recording with a cassette tape? And my final question, are there any decent talk shows worth listening to anymore? Most morning talkshows like Mancow and stuff are decent, but they are like, 6 hours long, and the 30 minutes I get in the car each morning usually satisfies my needs.
I've been doing something like this with Linux for a while now. I use a D-Link DSB-R100 (unfortunately discontinued), sox, lame, and crontab. I used to burn the resulting MP3s on a CD-R and take them with me to work, but now I've got an iPod, so I use that instead.
I originally used this setup to record NPR talk shows that I couldn't get on the radio while at work (because of lousy radio reception), but now I also use it to record a local radio station's electronic music show (which starts at 10pm on Saturday and runs for six hours!).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've been doing this for a while. Since most radio stations are on line I set up a scheduled task (cron job for the so inclined) to launch a browser at the appropriate time to the appropriate URL.
In my case I want a copy of a few public radio shows that played the night before and are archived at NPR. But this works for radio shows too. Since this is all happening at 3am I have the sound turned down.
I use Audio Grabber to record the file and convert it to an MP3. I pop in a CD-R when I get up and before my coffee is done I have a CD to take to the gym that contains the subset of news I want to hear when I want to hear it.
Still working on automating the CD-R creation. Gotta teach the cat to put the CD-R in the tray without scratching it.
Side note -- just looked, and RadiVo already is trademarked and has a website -- but no product. Eh. Slashdot 'em anyway.
I rarely listen to radio at home anymore -- my home theater system gets crappy reception. It's primarily my car. So I'd love for it to start recording a half-hour (or hour) before I get in the car:
1) Let me hear the weather and traffic that's inevitably broadcast just before I start driving
2) Scroll through the music, and skip over the commercials (until I catch up *snif*)
3) Hit a button to spool the current song off to the SD/memstik in [your favorite encoding here] for portable players.
At FM radio quality, I can't imagine anyone is overly concerned about piracy. In an ideal world, it would carry ID tags so I know what the artist and album are -- perhaps build me a shopping list while it's at it, or carry an iTunes URL so I can buy the full-strength version when I get home.
This shouldn't even be too hard to do: I think there's at least one Sony Clio model that has an FM receiver -- can you get at the streams? Hmm.. PalmOS doesn't multitask well, that might not be good enuf.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Before moving out of the lovely SF Bay area couple of years ago, I wanted to capture the local jazz station (KCSM) from my FM receiver to my PC.
I found a product called Total Recorder (www.highcriteria.com) - which has a scheduling feature (so I could capture the Jazz Oasis every evening at 7pm).
Besides recording anything that can be played on your computer, I also captured some Internet radio streams, such as www.live365.com, which were otherwise un-capturable. Nice to rip 11 hours of Internet radio to a CD and play it in the car.
BTW - Radio Shack sells an RCA to stereo plug convertor for converting left/right audio plugs to a single line in port on your PC.
If it even works close to this [wsj.com] I'll be sure to have a full selection of Ani DiFranco and Liberace at my fingertips!
You mean you would have your fingertips in Ani DeFranco
This would be great. My wife and I try to listen to the Capitol Steps show whenever it's on (two or three times per year), and sometimes we miss it. A "set it and forget it" radio TiVo system like this would get use in our house, for this and for other scheduled radio shows.
Heck, if it could be integrated with an iPod download mechanism... I think the number of geeks I know who would set up a cron job to download "Car Talk" into their iPods every week is probably significant.
I am sure I am probably missing something, but since this stuff is freely distributed to all of us and not the highest quality, wouldn't this be a simple legal way to record and trade music. I know I am ignoring the ads that we wouldn't be hearing that fund the radio station....but that really has nothing to do with RIAA. So would this be legal?
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They also have an adapter that will let you plug your CD player into the tape deck itself...
A few years ago, I did some experimentation (completely unguided, amateur fun) with radio ad filtering. The software made a number of simple measurements based on the audio input, including volume range, average volume, and average frequency. From this data, I formed "fingerprints" for talk, ads, and music.
Surprisingly, based on these fingerprints, the software was able to detect the type of content with moderate accuracy.
I'd like to see some technology like this incorporated into a PVR-type device for radio.
Not being talented enough to write anything useful, I discontinued the project. But I'm sure someone else could do it.
Timeshifting MP3 radio stations works well because the MP3 stream software reads the title and artist off each track as it arrives and the MP3s get nicely parcelled up with sane information about each track. Makes it easy to quickly sort through the stuff you want to listen to and discard the rest.
If FM radio time shifting is going to work, users are going to need to receive some sort of meta-data along with the tracks, talks and plays so that they can tell what has been received. For some programmes, being able to pick out the morning news bulletin may be enough. For a top 40 show, you'd probably want every track labelled and packaged.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Actually, this would be great. I have a couple of shows that i love listening to, but cant get in my office. I can get ehm a day late off usenet, but thats kind of annoying.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Other than that, I agree that there isn't much reason to have this. Why would you need to pause/rewind/timeshift radio? It is 75% commercials, 24% crap anyway. And there doesn't exist a radio talkshow host (aka shock jock) who says much worth listening to, let alone recording. I thought about getting a cheap FM tuner card for my Linux box. You can get one for about $15. I could then set up a cron to record......
That was my problem, I couldn't think of anything to record. Although I catch Stern every once in a while, he hasn't said anything new for 10 years. And all the other idiot Stern imitators with their overdone radio voices and sound effects just make me ill. NPR has a great website where I can listen to anything I might miss. Sometimes a classic rock station might play an entire album by an artist, but I probably already have it.
So I passed on the easy and cheap Linux solution, I would see absolutely no reason to buy a more expensive commercial product.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
"What you do with it is your own doing and there's nothing we can do to stop you," said Bob Fullerton, director of marketing for one of the manufacturers, PoGo Products. "But the main use is not to skip commercials, but to record your favorite talk-radio show or the ball game you're going to miss because you are at work." Isn't it illegal to record a MLB baseball game with out the Express written consent of MLB and the Team your listening to? and if i record music will i start getting what the F@#k are you doing files instead of the songs. Wait until the Lawyers get a hold of this one.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.
Now, the software that came with the D-Link was egregiously lame, and the $5 audio card in my PC made pretty lame audio recordings, so I gaveup on it :-) But that was DLink's lameness back then; presumably other products are smarter by now. I've heard that there's decent Linux software for the things, so maybe I'll try it again. The two biggest problems with the radio software were that
- It could only schedule one recording event, and only only could handle one day's clock, not a week's, so I could set it up in the morning before heading out to catch the train for work if I wanted to, but I couldn't set it up the night before or the weekend before.
- It only recorded sounds in
.WAV format, after accumulating them in RAM (in .WAV format), so instead of saving the program directly as an MP3, it needed twice the capacity of a .WAV, which came to something like 600MB/hour. (They did include some free MP3 software, and to cut them some slack, this was back when there were patent questions about the MP3 formats that they could dodge by doing this.) Back then I didn't have that much spare disk space, having split my 6GB drive between Linux and Windows. Now it's different, so even if the software's lame, I've got spare disk space.
It was really designed to use the computer as a friendly user interface to control the radio and use the PC's speakers, which it could do all on the analog side of a sound card, rather than having to digitize it.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There was a radio show I used to listen to while in Dallas religiously. The problem is that now that I'm in seattle it's on from 1:00 - 3:00 PDT, and I can't listen then (they don't like us streaming audio at work). I'd like something to record it every day. The problem is that the stream is from streamaudio.com, and requires windows media player. Any ideas?
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
XM radio ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Hmmm, they may be on to something here. Maybe I could come up with an item that can time shift a single image from a point in time. And how about being able to use it anywhere. Think that would work?... Nah.
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Every time I turn on the radio, it's the same songs over and over again.
Not music, talk. You just can't find that stuff on Kazaa.
I already get most of my radio via the BBC's 'listen again' service (sometimes available on ogg, mostly on WMA and RM). I can listen when I want, pause, fast forward, rewind and everything else. All I need is broadband to my car (or an in-car MP3 player since I have a RM-MP3 converter) and it'll be perfect.
For this reason I can't see a radio TiVo selling to well here, since all the decent ad-free radio (comedy for me but also classical music, serious discussion, various other public service stuff) is on the BBC anyway and the independants are endless loops of tripe that need no time shifting - they repeat themselves on a regular basis anyway.
Beep beep.
Really, how many radio shows are there worth recording? NPR yes. Pacifica, yes. Everything else? why bother? AM talk is whenever I listen a bunch of uninformed people talking to other uninformed people. why record that?
NPR you can just go to their site and listen to it again anytime.
Pacifica ditto.
yes I'm sure there are other programs that are of some use to someone but I don't know them all. now's your chance to point them out to me, not flame me.
oh and besides all that, you can hook a vcr up to a stereo and record 8 hours of radio onto VHS. People have done this for ages.
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I would like to see this. I don't know how serious I would be about scheduling the unit to record programs, but I'm very interested in replay capabilities. There have been many times when I've wanted to replay a blurb that I missed and wished I could have hit 'rewind'.
--
It's pledge month at the local PBS radio affiliate.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This would have been amusing about a year or so ago when GTA3 came out for PC. In the game, you have radio stations you can listen to. You can also add your own music to the game by putting Mp3 files into the correct folder. Tell me it wouldn't be damn cool to have a collection of MP3s collected from the radio. "You're now listening to Art Bell.."
(It's a double bonus for me. I live in Portland, and one of the cities in GTA3 is called Portland...)
"Derp de derp."
I keep finding myself reaching for a non-existant button on my car radio that will jump back a few seconds so I can listen to that comment I just missed, or the DJ telling the name of the great song that just played ...
...
I wish life came with a pause button
This is not the first time this type of application has been talked about on Slashdot.
Anyways, this software already exists for intenet streaming radio broadcasts:
http://www.replay-radio.com/
Joseph Elwell.
I cannot tell you how many times I have tuned to the news station to catch the tail end of a traffic report or something like that, and instinctively reached for the non-existent rewind control so I could hear the whole report without having to wait and listen for the next "Traffic on the ones" or whatever it was.
:)
TiVo takes over your brain like that, it's really insidious.
With multiple tuners and a modest storage device, it should not be a problem to maintain a 15-minute FIFO for a dozen or so of your preset stations.
Edith Keeler Must Die
They also have an adaptor that will let you plug a banana into your anus
You're a fucking idiot, Blaine.
Oh I get it, that's the guy who raped the 2 year old baby
dmiller@iinet.net.au
Funny you should mention this. I wanted this sort of thing so I could skip listening to Michael Savage and listen to John Bachelor and Paul Alexander's previous-night broadcast at a more reasonable hour.
1. timed record of radio show
2. delete all things below a certain sound level threshold (gets rid of 10% to 20% of talk radio airtime)
3. variable increase pitch/speed control
4. one button 30 second digital skip
5. export to flash card in mp3 or some patentless format (easily convertable of course).
I'd love to have something to 'tape' talk radio and let me compress the shows I like from 1 hour broadcast into
-10 to -15 minutes for pauses in spoken conservation
-20 minutes commercials and 'top of the hour news'
-5 minutes
------------
left with 30 - 35 minutes of stuff to listen to.
I first thought of regular TiVo as being a waste of money.....until I purchased one. Now....I cannot think of the last time I have watched live tv, honestly. And I get so much more use out of my 400 channels I'm paying for.
When I first thought of this for radio...I again..thought it was a waste of money. Then I thought of listening to a whole howard stern show...on the way HOME from work...skipping all the commercials. Right there it is worth it for me.
Rob
since AM is talk radio.
TiVo for telephone!
TiVo for slashdot!
TiVo for mail!
TiVo for church sermons!
TiVo for bowling!
TiVo for pinochle!
TiVo for stargazing!
TiVo for beer! It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
One great reaons for time shifting radio is Sports. If your team's radio announcer is better/more enthusiastic than the network dullards, time shift their radio broadcast by 3-7 seconds to compensate for the delay of video bouncing off satellites!
... rewind live radio. Tivo has changed my entire outlook and expectation of anything broadcast.
Often I'm listening to my fav. morning radio show, or NPR news, and miss something, and find myself actually looking for the rewind button. Pisses me off when I realize (a microsecond later) that it isn't there.
On another note, I also find that, when reading a book or magazine, that I want to CTL-F and search for a word, especially with techie books when I'm looking for a particular phrase or term. Guess I'm waiting for E-Ink and electronic paper.
If Slashdot is where the spelling-challenged go when they die, I'm in heaven.
http://www.archos.com/lang=en//products/prw_500326 .html
I have used Tivo now since they came out and I have fantasized many times about having this in a car radio. What was that? I missed it. Oh I can replay it thankgoodness. (also pause while answering phone etc.) Not to mention fast forwarding through those god-awful local advertisments.
fictious 'hate radio' liberal cliche here.
They have just as much right to their viewpoints as liberals do.
The main difference most people don't understand is that television news is geared towards your emotions and talk radio is geared towards your beliefs.
Emotions don't sell well on talk radio. That is why it has been very very difficult for liberal talk show hosts to have any national presense.
Another reason is that your average news consumer is much more sophisticated than 25 years ago and wants new information and new news, not just a rehash of old parroted news articles.
Demographically, we have a shifting audience:
1. fdr generation - old and declining in political clout - almost exclusively big government, government can solve all problems, increase social security/medicare spending - all democrat/liberal issues
2. 1930s babies - first generation in many families to vote republican (Eisenhower), first college educated generation, mostly city dwellers, not significantly tied to farm subsidies - less likely to be liberal/democrat voters
3. baby boomers - similar to 1930s generation but without the strong sense of responsibilty - very liberal/emotional (anti Vietnam, PC, etc) - largely democratic voters
4. slackers - cynical, skeptical of prior generations, tired of excesses imposed by baby boomer generation, rebelling against baby boomer music, culture, laws, ideals - more conservative
5. boomers kids - split between liberal and conservative
What you have is that the generations before and after the baby boomers are much more conservative and common sense oriented than the baby boomers and that the FDR generation doesn't have enough votes to combine with the baby boomers to dominate culture and politics.
The major advantage of a Tivo is program data. If I have to program in a start and stop time, then this is not like Tivo.
I think the largest market for these products will be NPR listeners. (I mean, what else is there on radio worth recording? Maybe Pacifica and that's it unless you are some kind of right wing nutbag and listen to Rush.)
So, NPR could start selling program data and encoding their broadcasts so that when I hear an ad for a program, I can press a button and it will be automatically recorded. That would be awesome. I'm really tired of missing Talk of the Nation.
Really. It isn't that hard. Add a computer-programmable radio (like Icom PCR-1000) and you can even change stations automatically. Of course, at that point, it's not really free, but it's sure convenient.
I've had my SGI recording Rush, Art Bell, Prarie Home, What Do You Know, and Dr. Demento automatically for a couple of years now. The only muss and fuss is burning a CD or DVD now and then to archive it all.
Since most of it is talk, I can use mono and low bitrate recording, so it takes about 3.5Mb per half hour.
Why buy something that is so easy to do already?
I await the day when white males are federally designated a minoritty group and can legally harass as many people as other groups have.
Because the guy is running Windows. On Windows it's not as easy as "find a copy of lame" and "crontab whatever recording schedule you want".
blog & fiction: jd87
Is there any software available that will give us Tivo functionality for our PCI radio tuner cards?
Any of the tv/radio tuner cards bundle this type of software?
Thanks!
Kyle
Why do you listen to guys that don't keep themselves fit?
Rush has been a paid political propagandist for the oligarch wing of the Republican party. His advocacy of military buildup has caused the largest budget deficit ever, placing his economics firmly against motherhood. His anti-progressive economics have hurt the working poor, and helped few other than the top 1%.
Rush Limbaugh has failed as a human being.
"The Point would be Talk Radio. It's huge. In fact it's bigger than huge."
Yet the home of Talk Radio is dying.
Except for the DJ talking over the music, this would be kind of nice. At least you'd dump the commercials.
I used to listen to 'all things considered", but i was sooo bored by it, I fell asleep at the wheel and took out a phone booth, three newspaper vending machines, and a pink flamingo.
This is the problem. TiVo works because there is content worth recording. I can't possible imagine what anyone would use a TiVo radio device for. Music formats offer nothing at 2 pm on Monday that you can't get at 3 am on Thrusday. A radio format in Tulas sounds the same as it does in Orlando. Just ask yourself... when was the last time you thought to yourself, "wow I missed that show on the radio!" It doesn't happen. Because you know that whenever you turn it on it's the same thing. Over and over. In order for the technology to mean anything you would have to have content to make it meaningfull. I can't think of any. In fact, I load up my Ipod because I know what's on the radio and I now have 5 or 10 gigs of something different. No content... no device.
Besides... didn't command audio already try this?
This is a gadget in search of a reason to exist... and there isn't one.
...at least in the UK. I don't know about elsewhere. It can record any of the radio channels that are available through cable. This includes virtually all of the local and national stations, plus quite a few that are digital only.
I use it to record specialist shows from BBC Radio 1 that are broadcast at ungodly hours, such as the Breezeblock and Gilles Peterson and listen to them at a more civilised time.
I often to listen to nationally syndicated programs that either comes on too late for me or the local affilate runs thier shows instead. I could use something like this, possibly.
That is, get radio listeners to be called thieves for skipping commercials
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
I've never had much use for TiVo. I grew up with hippie social worker parents, so television was strictly regulated and I've never developed much of an affection for it. Well, except for Six Feet Under.
But my burg has a handful of really good shows amongst all the usual Clearchannel Crappity Crap. Most of them are on at really odd hours; the blues shows on the local community nanowatt station all seem to be on at either 10:00 on a Tuesday morning or in the middle of the night; we've got a really good R&B/Soul rarities (think old Andre Williams) show on an NPR affiliate Saturday nights; and a kickass vinyl-vault type deal (that plays the Blue Cheer!) on the otherwise shitty classic rock station Sunday nights when I'm watching Six Feet Under.
I've considered just plugging in my Minidisc recorder to the reciever, then capturing/encoding the tunes, but that would be a pain in the ass to remember.
If I could just set something and forget about it, I'd be all over it.
Since most of it is public radio, anyway, I won't even have to worry about the weak, fleeting ethical twinge when skipping the commercials.
Hell, I can see myself recording All Things Considered every evening to listen to at work the next day...
hang brain.
I encode with LAME on my Windoze box all the time. And the 'Scheduled Tasks' dialog in Windoze makes it very easy to schedule one-off or repeated tasks, ala cron.
This is exactly what I need! While I don't watch television and therefore couldn't use a TiVo, I will definitely want one of these, especially since I am at work during my favorite talk radio crap and want to listen to it at different times.
www.RadioMyTime.com
www.RadioTime.com
.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
I believe something called a "tape recorder" was created several months ago to record "sound" from the "radio." btw, Tivo isn't used if one doesn't have cable or satellite. Why would someone want to record the static? Unless you get perfect reception (ie, radioTIVO for Sirius or XM), this item is not a good idea...
Heck, there's probably already a prog for this, but I'm just too lazy to keep up.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
BTW - Radio Shack sells an RCA to stereo plug convertor
I hear they sell subway cars also.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
This would be wonderfully good for college radio stations.
I have an old standalone FM receiver (non-amplifier) hooked up to the line-in of a computer. I tune it to a station and leave it there most of the time, then use a program to schedule a recording at a certain time of the day. Convert that to MP3, burn a CD once enough are collected, and life is good. I'd like to do this with multiple stations, though, not just a single station.
College radio is great because they play music that has escaped the Clear Channel suppression. They play a ton of different music. However, each DJ has their own format, and they change every few hours or so, so if you find a style of music that you like, you have to listen at an oddball time (such as Thursdays 1AM-3AM or something like that). A RadioTiVo would solve this problem!
Also, college radio hardly ever repeats a song, since there are so many minor bands striving to be heard. There's more music to play than there is airtime. So, if you hear a song that you like, that's probably your only chance to get it! A RadioTiVo would let you go back and selectively save the songs you like, even if you weren't recording in advance.
Radio is also much lower bandwidth than TV. It might be possible to record several stations at once! Imagine recording the entire dial, and then using some kind of matching algorithm to pick out individual songs. You could have a self-service "request" system this way: you just flag the songs you want, and then the service listens to all radio stations until the song eventually comes across. Then it saves it. That would be great.
I would imagine the RIAA will slap this thing down as soon as it is built, however....
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
You mean people still listen to that?
California is not the most liberal left-wing state in the nation except perhaps on a few specific issues. California has adopted a regressive sales tax regime, has outlawed gay marriage, has a smaller tax margin than at least two New England states, and was controlled by a Republican governor, Pete Wilson, for most of the 1990s.
Cool - I'll have to try it out. Thanks!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is something I've been wanting for about 20 years. I want to record radio programs (not music) that I can download to my iPod; then I could listen to it while walking, hiking, or on a road trip. In general, for time-shifting. I mostly want various public radio programs like Prairie Home Companion, Le Show, Car Talk, Afropop Worldwide, etc. Cassettes aren't long enough.
Nope. Typically a radio will have single receive stage with a single tuner (i.e. a single local oscillator) and so it can only be tuned into one station at a time. Of course, in the TV market there are now sets that have dual tuners so you can watch one show and PIP another (I looove this) but it doesn't exist for radio AFAIK. For one, there is no audio equivalent of PIP :) For two, recording radio hasn't been an option up to now.
Which brings up a head-scratcher for me: why haven't there been radio VCRs on the market before now? I've been dying for one for years -- a tuner, a tape deck, a clock -- how hard can it be?
Just as there are plenty of people who listen to NPR, the local Oi Oi Oi show and whatever other *scheduled* programming is out there left of 92.0 MHz, there are plenty of people who would have loved this product. Why did we have to wait until the mp3 revolution for it to happen? The technology has been in place since the late 70's.
The non-comm FM station I chief-engineered for several years started doing a running 7-day mp3 archive years ago and I can't imagine living without it ...
One simple rule for its versus it's
I was thinking of propositioning KERA to make a program guide based recorder, all open source, so poeple could be notified when their interests came on the air. Like TiVo, not just a dumb record at this time thing. Maybe I will...
Keep listening!
JF
Plano
It seems that all of the responses to this fall into two categories:
1. People who don't understand why you would want to time-shift top 40 or talk radio.
2. People who listen to NPR.
People in the first group should take note that there is, in fact, radio worth time shifting and check it out.
...and handy for the trafic report lady to give her 5 more seconds of fame reporting another accident!
FreeView is the UK's digital TV service, it also broadcasts several radio channels. Now if only I could set up a wishlist for "Mornington Crescent" without TiVo insisting on a Baker Street, I'd be set!
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
YES! There are local DJ/music programs I would timeshift. There are local talk radio programs I would timeshift.
...
But even better, for those of us who live in the uninhabited parts of the US, fire and forget INTERNET radio timeshifting would be great.
Doctor Demento? In Roach Hair? No way! News of the Weird? In Deer Tick? No way! Practice my Czech? In Bug Tussle? No way! All Blacks LIVE? In Swamp Poodle? No way!
But with iRadio
This was the allure of Kerbango [until it was killed March 21, 2001]. Kerbango freed you from local radio. [Unfortunately, there was no recording capability in Kerbango, so there was no timeshifting.]
[XMRadio and Sirius need to kick it up a notch.]
I'd end up listening to hour old traffic reports without realising, and when the DJ says what time it is, I'd believe him and end up being an hour late.
Does TiVo skip commmercials? I thought that was RTV. Anyhow, it bothers me slightly that they say TiVo when I think they really mean PVR's in general.
My GF records programmes off the very wonderful Radio 4 using a mains timer and a radio/cassette recorder. Not very hi tech but it does the job.
Obviously...
Stupid poster not being able to figure this out by himself. My 80 year old grandma does this too, but she only uses -q 6.0.
And then they say Linux isn't usable by the general public? Hogwash.
In case anyone wants to build their own PAR, there's a company I visited a while back with all the guts you need to build a variety of audio storage, time shifting, etc. devices: http://www.portalplayer.com/ Enjoy!
FreeView is the UK's digital TV service, it also broadcasts several radio channels.
This is true, and TiVo does record radio shows from digital set top boxes in exactly the same way as it does TV shows (by EPG, as suggestions, all of that good stuff)
However, TiVo isn't optimal for this: when the set top box is receiving audio broadcasts, it displays a static image on the video output, and since TiVo doesn't know any better, it slavishly records this, wasting lots of storage.
I gather that Nokia is now producing an integrated PVR and terrestrial digital TV reciever. This saves the digital stream as broadcast, rather than re-encoding an analogue signal as TiVo does -- an approach with both advantages and disadvantages, but which means that radio shows are only stored as audio. The review I read indicated that since the machine was designed for video, it had enough storage for several hundred hours of digital audio.
This box also has digital audio out, so archiving to DAT, Minidisc, CDR or PC is possible.
You see, there is a lot of very good content on radio nowadays, but generally you have to avoid the commercial stations. They tend to have the interesting stuff because they know that people want more than the spoon fed commercial junk.
Myself, I often listen to Triple J which is a government-owned national broadcaster in Australia. They have a lot of diverse programs usually aimed at under-25 audiences (but still have stuff for over 25s).
I'm living in Europe now, but I still wanted to listen to some JJJ shows, so I set up a Linux box in Sydney with a BT878 based FM card, a cheapie sound card, some scripts, and oggenc. Now I get regular recordings of various shows each day that I download and listen to. The bonus of a BT878 type card is that I can tune to any other local station as well.
And I can also live stream too, at much better bitrates than the stations' own 'online streaming' at some unlistenable bitrate.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
Is a subscribtion based service that will download Most npr shows for a monthly fee. Also it has books in a audible format. I have never used this service, but it will allow you to target a specific show.
Windows does have a scheduler.
Windows 2000 - Programs->Accessories->Scheduled Tasks
And lame does have a version for Windows..
Not music, talk. You just can't find that stuff on Kazaa.
I beg to differ. Try searching for "Drew and Mike" in WinMX. Kazaa is "the suck"
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
I've been recording stuff off the radio for years here in the UK and I use Windows. It's not too difficult to hack some Windows code to record sound input to a wav file. Lame does the rest.
In the last few months www.bbc.co.uk/radio2 have made their shows available for streaming. The shows are posted soon after they are broadcast and are updated when the next show is broadcast a day or week later. This largely does away with the need to record them when they are broadcast but still it's good to have a mp3 if I want to archive something special.
Apparently the BBC radio streaming is popular with ex-pats living round the world who no longer have to get up at some bad hour to hear the stream of their fave radio station back in blighty...
The big problem I can see with this is the basic assumption that there's something on the radio worth listening to in the first place.
God, I'd love to Tivo past the pledge drives
But honestly, I promise to still contribute!
Slightly off-topic, but relevent nonetheless. BBC Radio have got an online section where you can listen to their radio... online. But (and heres the relevant part), they store back broadcasts so you can re-listen to them. Maybe other radio stations could follow suit in the meantime?
Linky: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/
"Radio on Demand" link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio1_promo.shtml
Heh, and i wouldnt be the first to point out that this way of doing things helps with the legal issues.
... kind of does this already. If you're listening to FM radio with it, you can record it direct to MP3. It holds the last 30 seconds of play in buffer so you won't miss the entire song if you don't hit record right away.
I have one of these units and it's a pretty nice feature - though I'll admit I almost never listen to FM with it. Too much MP3 storage.