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The RIAA's Push for an Audio Broadcast Flag
aaronsorkin writes "The Recording Industry Association of America has discovered that digital radio broadcasts can be copied and redistributed over the Internet, and so it is pushing the FCC to adopt an audio broadcast flag, which would likely prevent users from sending copyrighted radio programs over the Internet. But it could also hamstring other legitimate uses by preventing a digital radio program from leaving the device on which it was recorded. The FCC has initiated a notice of inquiry (pdf), typically a step leading to formal rule-making. The public may submit comments to the FCC between June 16 and July 16. A lobbyist friend sent me copies of the private correspondence on the subject between RIAA president Cary Sherman and Consumer Electronics Association president Gary Shapiro, and Cryptome just posted them here (pdf) and here (pdf). Yes, they're legit. Mindjack just posted an article I wrote on the subject titled, 'Will Digital Radio Be Napsterized?'"
They did this about 15 years ago with what was the last promising tape-based format, and ended up killing the medium for pretty much everyone but pro audio studios. Wonder how much potential revenue they missed out on w/ that fiasco?
This is undoubtedly what the long term future holds. However, for the next 50 years, if you don't buy their stuff outright, they'll just get a law passed under which the government collects money from you on their behalf. You will pay the RIAA whether you want to or not.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I'll answer that question: not very lossy at all. You probably don't want to do it on an onboard sound card, but any decent PCI (or even USB) sound board ($~40) will provide for this purpose perfect recording.
This is compounded by the fact that radio signals (as someone above pointed out) go through a process called "dynamic range compression", which basically makes the soft bits louder and the loud bits softer. This does a couple of things: 1) it makes setting recording levels for FM recording a snap, since it's all close to the same amplitude, 2) it makes sound card fidelity even less important, since you don't have a huge dynamic range to deal with*, 3) it screws up the quality anyway, so who cares if your card puts a -50 dB noise signal in there?
(Comment about dynamic range compression: I suppose boosting soft bits of the audio helps to raise the signal-to-noise ratio for weak FM signals--otherwise very soft passages would get lost in static. Even with range compression the local classical station has issues with this.However, wouldn't it be trivial to do the range compression, then broadcast the dynamic shift on a sideband channel? Then the FM receiver could reconstruct the original dynamic from the (compressed) signal and the sideband dynamic indication. That would be the best of both worlds... and would be backwards-compatible since older FM receivers would just get the compressed signal, same as they do now.)
You're not going to get audiophile-quality sound off an FM broadcast. This isn't the fault of the recording equipment, the radio receiver, or the FM transmission process; it's what they do to the signal before it hits the transmitter. This is a good thing for this purpose though, since it means even crappy hardware doesn't mess up the recording!
*Some of the most challenging signals to record accurately are those with both very loud and very soft periods. The recording gain has to be set low enough to accomodate the loud passages. Then, the combination of the low gain with the low intrinsic volume of the soft bits makes for a very low signal--which, on bad hardware, can be comparable to the noise floor. But we don't care about this on the radio, since it's *all* loud.