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.)

Comments

Cheap FM Receivers for PCs

[billstewart]

A few years ago I bought a USB-controlled radio for my PC for $29. (It was a D-link product, now apparently discontinued.) There have also been several FM Radio cards for PCs, and most of the current TV Tuner cards for PCs also do FM radio. Seems pretty silly to buy a $150 frob for radio when you can get TV as well for $75-100, or radio for $29.

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.