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Listen to Internet Radio over Wifi
wildumut writes "There's an article on the Register about new WIFI radio tuners, worth a look. 'Wi-Fi is not only freeing up notebook and PDA users to connect to the Internet from anywhere in the home, it's also making Internet radio work (almost) like the real thing.'" The company website has some more information, but these aren't available for sale yet.
I've had wireless radio for years. It's called... erm... radio.
I support a football (soccer if you prefer :-) team that has a webcast of all the home matches. Since very few matches are televised per season, it's a good second-best, especially because I've got a nice fast broadband connection. Just take the portable into the front room, link it up to the projector using the VGA input, and watch the match with the video stream being served using WiFi from the router at the back of the house :-)
:-)
The quality isn't as good as broadcast TV (!) but it's a damn sight better than radio
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Doesn't this mean people will be able to drive around pulling radio broadcasts out of thin air? I don't want to live in a world like that.
... how long will it be before we can grill a chicken by hanging out the kitchen window on the end of a stick and cook it with RF?
The Erogenous Zone
Tune in later this year to hear "This is WIFI Radio, a Clear Channel Partner."
Yes, but now you can get stations from all around the world where ever you are...
I live in upstate new york, I am in a college town, so there is some decent radio, but when I want news from around the world, I want radio from around the world...
I could read a lot of it on the internet, but that is hard to do while washing dished/making dinner/working on my bicycle...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
At my house I have a small Wifi-enabled Avertec 3120 V plugged into the back of the stereo system. Had to set up Winamp for some easy key combination, like 'space' to start playing and N to stop.
Then it's Internet Radio list in WinAmp, or Shoutcast.com, choose the one with the better bit rate and we're off with high quality Internet radio.
Any cheap laptop with WiFi card or internal WiFi would work.
Let me just check.
:)
I can buy a radio, listen, enjoy.
Or I can buy a computer, buy a wireless lan card, buy a wireless lan radio, configure everything, PAY for a reasonable intenet connection, listen, enjoy (within a small area around my hub)
Ah that's real progress
Wait - isn't there a serious lag and quality issue?
Since when lag is an important thing for a one way transmission?
As for quality, a 96Kbps MP3 stream sound a lot better than FM radio.
Ugh - retrofitting my house for wireless connectivity was a royal pain in the ass, man. My heart goes out to you and the effort you'll be putting into this. Plugging in that Dlink wireless router and using the web interface to configure it nearly gave me a asthma attack.
I also reply below your current threshold.
and it will be because of the descendants of things like this.
One day you'll be able to tune into a radio station based on URL, and it will be *the* true revolution for music delivery. Information may or may not want to be free...but it definitely hates coming from central sources.
Newspaper cartoons are to Strongbad as top 40 is to the bands of the future.
but these aren't available for sale yet.
It doesn't even look like they have made a prototype yet. The images on the website are all computer generated.
Johnkoerner.com
Radio revolutionized communications, especially as it became more available to smaller companies. It made a wider range of ideas, music, and personalities available to the common person. Radios eventually became omnipresent - a nearly free (minor cost for a radio and power/batteries) outlet for on-demand contact with the outside world.
Radio's core problem, though, is that there is only a limited spectrum that's both electromagnetically effective and safe for human exposure at high power levels. Otherwise we'd be pulling power from the air instead of wire.
It's still in it's infancy, but I wouldn't be at all suprised if today's clumsy fledgling attempts at digital network-based radio will later be seen as heralding the birth of a whole new medium - same concept as radio, but even more available.
Cable tv, encrypted compressed signals over wire, made it possible to host hundreds (thousands?) of channels, and far cheaper to run them (no broadcasting, less infrastructure per station, etc). The end result: hundreds of channels of purile crap. And mixed in with all that crap are a good number of true gems that never would have seen the light of day in a world of pure airwave broadcasting. The public is now exposed to history, culture, technologies, and news that it never would have had access to before.
I think wifi radio is just one more step in the direction of providing a denser and low-cost medium for propagation of signal. Satelite radio as well (I say let em target regions - even neighborhoods, and let Clear Channel and others be-damned).
Any broadcast medium that brings down the cost of operation for the same general service is inherently a good thing - while it will introduce new content that isn't worth much, it will also allow a wider range of content, and make large-scale advertising income less of a driving survival requirement.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. KORP radio: 30 minutes of continuous top 10 big-studio hits, every hour on the hour.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
Saying something like "In excess of ten thousand radio stations broadcast their programs on the Internet." is all well and good, but the thing has a knob, doesn't it? If it was A Really Big Knob, I imagine you could scan through a few hundred stations, but wouldn't it have to be A Really Really Awfully Big Knob to get through all of them?
Wow! Wireless radio, what will they think of next.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
But your radio never performed encryption/decryption or balanced your checkbook. Nor was your computer regulated by the FCC. But now that your data processing device has become a communications device, the FCC (or non-US equivalent) has jurisdiction over your computer.
This is why Wi-Fi should never be integrated with the motherboard chipset (a la Centrino). Keep it as an optional add-on. Let the FCC regulate a PC Card or USB device, not the entire computer.
Down with non-optional bundling of law with convenience.
I have a treo 600 through sprint, with their unlimited data service package. With the latest pocket tunes software I can stream audio from the internet where ever I am. Generally if there is cell service, I can get a data connection. I know it's not traditional WIFI, but it's still really neat! :-)
I want to listen to what I want, when I want. and I want diversity. This company definitely has an interested customer in me.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
In my opinion this is the populace "Routing around" the limited point of view that we receive on traditional radio.
If this succeeds and people can run 802.11 "radio stations" for local areas it will prove that the FCC has long ago left the needs of the people.
The reason I say this is the inconvenience needed to listen to this kind of radio. If it can succeed, imagine what would happen if we had that kind of diversity of regular radio.
The FCC hasn't served the people with respect to radio for quite some time.
The HomePod from MacSense is already available, and best of all, it will stream music from any iTunes shares it finds.
A SqueezeBox can do that, no need for a WinXP box. The latest server software even has a module to let you browse ShoutCast with your remote.
ME: "Hey, this is great! I can listen to IDM and doom metal and prog-rock radio stations on the go!"
RADIO: "Coming up next - King Crimson"
ME: "Awesome! King Crimson on wifi internet radio!"
RADIO: "Cat's foot - iron BUFFERING...."
ME: "Iron "buffering"? That's not the right lyric"
RADIO: "Politicians BUFFERING.... BUFFERING...."
ME: "Screw this! Why did I sell my iPod for this??"
I just got through building a really nice home media system with WiFi.
The centerpiece is a PC running SageTV. It uses a hardware mpeg encoder to capture video from my digital cable box and save it on a 250 GB hard drive. Encoding at the "DVD Standard Play" quality uses about 3 GB per hour of video and the quality is definitely acceptable. Also stored on the monster hard drive is my entire CD collection ripped to very high bitrate MP3. The hardware media card also includes a built-in radio tuner. The machine has a DVD burner in it as well, and SageTV glues it all together.
Now, the really cool part of it is, I can access the mpeg video files and MP3s over my home network. With an mpeg video codec, I can use any of a variety of players to play my recorded television anywhere in my house on a laptop. SageTV also offers a separate piece of client software that allows you to remote-control the PVR from any networked computer and play any of its recorded media -- so, if I'm in the garage with my laptop, I can call up the current TV guide and select a program to record right there without having to directly interact with the media PC.
The only thing I haven't messed around with yet is the radio part of it. Mainly, because radio sucks, and because I do have access to all of the music-only channels through the cable TV (and therefore the PVR) anyway.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
I realized that I'd like to be able to broacast my TV signal to my laptop so I can use my laptop as a wireless TV (with cable connections for the "erm it's called TV" crowd)
AIK
One of the coolest things I have done yet with my T-Mobile Pocket PC device with GPRS is listen to streaming talk radio stations while driving. At a max of 40k there really is not the bandwidth for quality music, but for talk nerds like myself it is awesome. Right now their all you can eat plan for wireless data is $19.95 and I am buying that for other uses anyway. Playing with buffers and what not yields a very reliable very high quality signal even with the frequent tower hopping that happens when driving. It is good for even the local stations which tend to be on the AM dial. A 20k steam sounds so much better then the wines and pops of AM radio, especially after dark when most stations have to turn their wattage down.
The only issue I have is when I am traveling at a high rate of speed on the Interstate. Apparently the tower hopping at 70 - 80 MPH is a little too much to keep a steady enough connection. Averaging 40 - 50 MPH works very well, however.
Who ever it is that takes smooth tower jumps and adds wifi speeds to it, they will be a very rich person.