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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....
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.