Slashdot Mirror
Review: PogoProducts' Radio Your Way
An anonymous reader writes "Being a long time TiVo-head and a talk radio junkie, I've been waiting for the first commercially available PVR for radio (PAR?). PogoProducts finally released just such a product, which they call 'Radio Your Way'. After seeing the announcement on Slashdot I quickly placed my order and have now been using it for about a week. The following is a quick rundown of the good and the bad."
Recording is fairly straight forward. There is a red button on the front that is used for manually starting and stopping recording of the current 'mode' (AM/FM/Voice), and a timer function which allows up to 10 scheduled recordings to be programmed. There is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to scheduling these recordings, but once you understand the controls it's quite easy to add or modify scheduled recordings. You can set up repeating recordings for a given day (Mon, Tues, Wed., etc.), every day, or Mon-Sat (which I thought was a bit odd - why not Mon-Fri?). A really nice feature of the scheduled recordings is that the device will automatically turn on and off before and after recording stops, meaning you don't have to worry about wasting batteries by leaving the unit on 24/7.
Listening to recordings is a breeze. There are standard next/prev and FF/RW buttons that work like a VCR. If you FF a selection that is not playing it moves extremely fast, and if you FF while playing it scans - allowing you to hear the content zipping along so you know when the commercial is over, for example.
The internal memory holds approximately 4 hours of audio, and can be supplemented with SD/MMC cards giving you up to 1 Gig of storage and days of recording time.
The device comes with a desktop application for transferring, playing, and converting files. I haven't used it much but my first impressions were positive. No complaints here.
The BadGiven that this is a 1.0 product and the first of its kind (as far I know), I fully expected there to be some usability issues and missing features. I was right. The most notable missing feature is the ability to pause a live recording. This is apparently due to the fact that there is no 'always on' buffer ala TiVo. How many times have you been listening to the radio and wanted to rewind 10 seconds because you missed something? Pausing live radio seems like an obvious feature for a Radio PVR, but you won't get it with Radio Your Way. Live recording is strictly a manual option - hit the red button to record, hit the stop button to stop, then back up and listen to what was recorded. This is very archaic for someone used to the power of TiVo. Hitting the red button while recording actually pauses the recording, which I suppose could be useful for on the fly editing of commercials. However, the lack of a true 'pause live radio' feature is a serious drawback that I'm sure will be corrected in future versions, even if it's a small buffer.
Other disappointments:
- No manual 'auto stop' feature. I'd like to be able to hit record and tell it to stop in a given amount of time. Unfortunately if you hit record you have to manually hit stop or it will continue recording until the memory is filled of the batteries run out.
- Uses AAA batteries instead of a chargeable system.
- Reception is so-so.
- Very poor speaker quality - stick with headsets or car adapter.
- No off button! As far as I can tell, once you turn the device on there is no way to manually turn it off other than to wait for it to enter sleep mode after several minutes. Very annoying.
- Overall the device feels a bit cheap, particularly the volume control button. This ain't no iPOD.
- Poorly written manual.
-A bit pricey at $150.
--- Conclusions ---
Despite the drawbacks listed above, Iï½m happy with the Radio Your Way from PogoProducts. It gives me the basic ability to time-shift AM/FM programming in a small, lightweight, portable package. I wouldn't use it for recording FM music - stick with traditional MP3 players for that. But for those of us that are addicted to talk radio (I'm a day one P1 for those of you in Dallas) it's a good solution, and will tide you over until the next generation of devices comes to market.
The Good The product has a decent form factor and intuitive buttons for playback. It has a 3V DC-in so you can keep it powered in your car (a $15 3V car adapter from RadioShack did the trick for me), a line-in port for recording from external sources, and of course a USB port for transferring files to your PC.
Recording is fairly straight forward. There is a red button on the front that is used for manually starting and stopping recording of the current 'mode' (AM/FM/Voice), and a timer function which allows up to 10 scheduled recordings to be programmed. There is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to scheduling these recordings, but once you understand the controls it's quite easy to add or modify scheduled recordings. You can set up repeating recordings for a given day (Mon, Tues, Wed., etc.), every day, or Mon-Sat (which I thought was a bit odd - why not Mon-Fri?). A really nice feature of the scheduled recordings is that the device will automatically turn on and off before and after recording stops, meaning you don't have to worry about wasting batteries by leaving the unit on 24/7.
Listening to recordings is a breeze. There are standard next/prev and FF/RW buttons that work like a VCR. If you FF a selection that is not playing it moves extremely fast, and if you FF while playing it scans - allowing you to hear the content zipping along so you know when the commercial is over, for example.
The internal memory holds approximately 4 hours of audio, and can be supplemented with SD/MMC cards giving you up to 1 Gig of storage and days of recording time.
The device comes with a desktop application for transferring, playing, and converting files. I haven't used it much but my first impressions were positive. No complaints here.
The BadGiven that this is a 1.0 product and the first of its kind (as far I know), I fully expected there to be some usability issues and missing features. I was right. The most notable missing feature is the ability to pause a live recording. This is apparently due to the fact that there is no 'always on' buffer ala TiVo. How many times have you been listening to the radio and wanted to rewind 10 seconds because you missed something? Pausing live radio seems like an obvious feature for a Radio PVR, but you won't get it with Radio Your Way. Live recording is strictly a manual option - hit the red button to record, hit the stop button to stop, then back up and listen to what was recorded. This is very archaic for someone used to the power of TiVo. Hitting the red button while recording actually pauses the recording, which I suppose could be useful for on the fly editing of commercials. However, the lack of a true 'pause live radio' feature is a serious drawback that I'm sure will be corrected in future versions, even if it's a small buffer.
Other disappointments:
- No manual 'auto stop' feature. I'd like to be able to hit record and tell it to stop in a given amount of time. Unfortunately if you hit record you have to manually hit stop or it will continue recording until the memory is filled of the batteries run out.
- Uses AAA batteries instead of a chargeable system.
- Reception is so-so.
- Very poor speaker quality - stick with headsets or car adapter.
- No off button! As far as I can tell, once you turn the device on there is no way to manually turn it off other than to wait for it to enter sleep mode after several minutes. Very annoying.
- Overall the device feels a bit cheap, particularly the volume control button. This ain't no iPOD.
- Poorly written manual.
-A bit pricey at $150.
--- Conclusions ---
Despite the drawbacks listed above, Iï½m happy with the Radio Your Way from PogoProducts. It gives me the basic ability to time-shift AM/FM programming in a small, lightweight, portable package. I wouldn't use it for recording FM music - stick with traditional MP3 players for that. But for those of us that are addicted to talk radio (I'm a day one P1 for those of you in Dallas) it's a good solution, and will tide you over until the next generation of devices comes to market.
Sounds like a good idea, but I don't see this catching on to the extent that Tivo has even if they do make the improvements suggested in the article.
There's just too much of a lack of quality radio programming these days for me to ever consider buying one of these.
Would've been cool to have in the 1950's-60's though when families used to gather around the radio rather than a TV set.
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
Every time I hear something on the radio that I want to replay, my hand makes the same motion I use for my PVR and I wonder why this product isn't out on the market already. Now it is... imagine, radio without commercials as long as you are "behind" the broadcast in time.
Time to start hunting the web for the best price!
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
The "Radio Personal Recorder" from RPR Products out of Tucson has been around for a while, I thought. Specs, etc., can be found
here.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Host: We have anonymous reader on the line.
AR: Hello?
Host: Turn your radio down.
AR: Hello?
Host: You need to turn your radio down!
AR: Hello?
*click*
AR: That was rude!
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Every time I hear something on the radio that I want to replay, my hand makes the same motion I use for my PVR...
Do you drool everytime you hear a bell too?
Big deal - this is like a digital tape recorder. To be a true PAR it would need at least these features:
- Guide service. Imagine a recorder that knows what song is playing on the radio right now and saves this 3:26 chunk of audio to "BritneySpearsHotGrits.mp3" for you. At the very least it needs show-based guide service. VCRs have had timers since like 1982.
- Pause live radio (as noted by the review)
- Wishlisting (Find me songs by Aretha Franklin.)
I don't think radio stations advertise what songs they will play ahead of time, but you could imagine that you could scrape the "currently playing" track off the station web site and retroactively label the audio. If the PAR is constantly recording a station, and then it sees a track by Aretha Franklin, it saves that last song for you.
Until something works like this, it's about as useful as a cassette player with a timer.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
A few years back, I heard about something called an MPTrip CD player, it was the first of it's kind. A portable CD Player that could actually play MP3s.... it was cheep too, only 150 CDN dollars!
I ran out and got one as soon as it came out. Frankly it was a piece of shit, none of the features one would really need like skipping between albums was there. It skipped like MAD, and it sucked battery power like there was no tomorow. Overall, a terrible CD player, it couldn't even play regular CD's!
Needless to say, I stopped using it after about a month. Two years later (or a few weeks ago) I picked up a second mp3 CD player, this one rocks and actually works. The product has been seriously refined since the first one came out, and I am very satisfied.
From reading "The Bad" part of this review I see that the author is having the same sort of problems... I guess the message is: hmmm thats cool, but I'll wait until Panasonic, Sony, or anyother reputable company makes one.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Uh, actually, the RPR product appears to be several devices chained together, rather than the sigle device reviewed. I'm sure any of us could figure out how to use the 'audio out' in conjunction with the 'mic' jack on just about anything to successfully record.
This topic, and device, was last discussed on Slashdot May 12th (found via slashdot search for "radio your way".)
Two links I found useful were a a competing piece of hardware, Neuros, and a much cheaper substitute if the radio program is streamed on the internet, Replay Radio. Plus an even earlier Slashdot thread.
In fairness, this is not a dupe, as the May 12th thread was about 'future' products and this is a product review.
--LP
School closings during snowstorms.
We've all tuned in time to hear "Tangoville" announced and had to sit and wait for them to work all they way around the alphabet to get back to "Sierraville" for you.
Because the player is flash-based, you can only upload/download mp3s using the Windows MP3 manager software. Having done projects like this in the past, I offered to port the manager software to linux for the company, free of charge.
My offer was immediately accepted, but came with an NDA regarding any code they would send me. After I explained that if I were going to do it for free, I'd want it to be open source, I never heard another word, despite several followup emails.
The company has obviously decided against open source of any of their products, though I can't imagine why. If someone really gave a shit what the download/upload protocol was for their software, it would be fairly trivial to reverse it.
So anyway, bear this in mind if you think Pogo is the company for you. You'll be using their stuff on windows or via an emaulator. Jeff
I also pre-ordered one and have been playing with it for a week or so. First off, you can turn it off by holding the Stop button down for 2-3 seconds.
.wav blows the file size up about a factor of almost 20 (at least on the one I did it to: 14M -> 225M).
I got mine not so much as a portable device, but as the first thing I'd found that could do timed recordings from radio. Thus, I'm plugging it in and leaving it next to the computer with the idea of burning programs to CD to listen at the car later.
There are two problems with this:
1. If the USB cable is plugged in, everything else is disabled, including recording. So make very sure you remember to unplug it after transferring files.
2. The recording quality is very low --- by default only 16Kbps. You can switch that to 32Kbps (using twice the space) by holding the EQ button down for a couple seconds (something you have to carefully read the table of button functions to find out), but even 32Kbps is barely good enough for decent speech. Don't expect to record real music with this.
3. Reception is worse than "so-so" in my book. While strong stations do come in fine, there's a local station run out of a high school that is the only classical station in Portland (KBPS) that I like. It comes in just fine on every other radio in the house and car, but this thing can't even pick up a hint of it (well, maybe a weak hint once in a while if you listen through the static enough). And that's with the antennae plugged in (which works through the earphone jack). I was hoping to record shows like Carl Haas and Shickele Mix off here, but with both the low recording quality and the fact that it can't pick up the station anyhow, I'm outta luck on that.
4. For some reason, probably relating to cpu performance I'm guessing, they record to a proprietary format, not mp3. The desktop application will convert to wav, and then you can mp3 that, but I imagine that only makes the sound worse (I haven't really tried it yet, only the wav conversion). The conversion to
So, while it's an interesting toy, it's definitely V1.0. I may end up using it as a portable voice recorder, but I'm planning on recording some shows that are talk only like Science Friday and a local group's weekly local issues speech and Q&A show.