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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....
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
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 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?
Maybe I am just dense, but if Stern has been canned from the airwaves in your region, forget time shifting, how would you record it in the first place?
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
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
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.
I almost never catch Car Talk on NPR on the weekends because it's on before I'm out driving around (I'm in CA, and I sleep in on weekends).
Now, OTOH, on the weekdays I find myself listening to crappy morning shows during my commute if I'm not up for news. I would really like the option of pulling up a show from the weekend (or a Science Friday or whatever) and listening to it rather than putting on Sarah & No-Name and listening to what happened on TV the night before just to have *something* to listen to.
Hell, I spend roughly as much time commuting as I do in front of the TV during the week. If you can see why TiVO has a market, surely you can see one here, too?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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!
I almost never listen to the radio. I might if I could essentially tivo it.
blah blah blah
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".
Let's review the differences:
Capacity:
Tape capacity: 60-90mins
Flash card capacity: 256Megs (256 mins at a very good quality mp3).
H/drive capacity: ~5Gig for a protable? (5000mins=83 hours)
Search/rewind/jump capabilities:
Tape: Rewind/FF. ANYONE who ever used a tape player would agree it's very s l o w.
Flash: instant
h/drive: very fast.
Ability for signal processing:
Tape: None
flash or drive: anything our circuits/processor allow. For example, commercial skip.
Size:
Tape: limited to pretty big factor by tape size
Flash: can be VERY small
h/drive: probably same size as tape player for now.
Other capabilities:
For example, ability to record several tracks at once, enabling recording of mmore than one frequency.
Tape: None
flash or drive: ability to write in parallel to multiple files.
Summary:
Tape has no benefits whatsoever (perhaps cost?)
over flash. H/drive is preferrable over flash if capacity is an issue and/or movement is not (i.e. for home as opposed to walkman-like functionality).
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
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.
TechTV has a decent guide on bitrates... maybe this will help. Hope that helps...
the blood has stopped pumping, and he's left to decay
the me that you know is now made up of wires
"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!
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.
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.
The Point would be Talk Radio. It's huge. In fact it's bigger than huge.
This guy already has people paying him for the privelege of listening to his show "24/7." He maintains a 2-week archive.
It's not about the music (is there anyone left who listens to radio for the music?), it's about the gab. This guy's already got one of these radio Tivo's, and has been promoting it's use on his website in his campaign against this guy. And everybody seems to take their cues from this guy, who now has his own nationwide radioshow too. I know as well that NPR audio archives are likewise very popular.
It's all huge, mostly absurd, and now available on-demand. Short term, it make take some money out of the pockets of the outfits that charged for access to their audio archives, but long-term it's gotta be a good thing for a genre that's just getting bigger (and more influential, rightly or wrongly) on a daily basis.
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.
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
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
And what's wrong with the audio files on their website?
http://cartalk.cars.com/Radio/Show/online
Sure, they're RealAudio, but that's not a problem *cough*mencoder*cough*Audio Hijack*cough*.
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.
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
...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.
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 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.
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