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Digital Radio With Removable Flash Storage
Billy69 writes "In a comment in a story yesterday about TiVo and MS Media Centre, somebody made a comment about being able to store Digital radio straight to a format to use on a MP3 player.
Ladies and Gentlemen (and geeks) I give you The Bug.
It is a DAB digital radio that can timeshift, store as MP2 or MP3 straight to an SD card, and can connect out via USB or SPDIF.
Oh, and it is sexy as hell."
Now that that's out of the way...
Euro broadcasts use slightly different frequency settings and bandwidths (I did have a portable with a switch in it for AM/MW bandwidth, FM was simply being able to dial 98.0 instead of odd intervals like 98.1, 98.3 in North America) Hopefully it's available for US buyers (best check lest it get intercepted at the border by the Federales. You know how Washington listens when RIAA, etc. bark. They know they're Master's Voice*)
This would be wonderful with satellite radio (all these great stations with swing and jazz), but I would probably not use it for broadcast, at least where I live. DJ's talking over the music is probably encouraged to screw with us who made tapes back in the poor days (lived in a paper bag in a septic tank or shoebox in the middle of the road...) Unless, say, I wanted to archive Paul Harvey or something like that. (This would have kicked butt back when J.P. McCarthy was still alive and doing his radio shows on WJR-Detroit)
Sexy? Reminds me of a Martian War Machine
* Arcane reference to Victor, the RCA dog.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here
... wouldn't you prefer something like this?
Maybe in the US, but in the UK where the Bug is sold there's no such problem!
I googled for places that sell it, and found it at £150 here: The Bug. It translates to roughly 270 USD.
This is a DAB - Digital Audio Broadcasting - not an AM/FM radio. I have no idea whether the DAB standard we have here in the UK/EU is a world-wide standard or not, and whether these things would work in the US or not. Sadly, I suspect that now that DAB sets are coming with the ability to record, that people like the MPAA will be working hard to ensure that they won't...
DAB is great. Got a Perstel Bluenote for Christmas and I'm currently listening to BBC 6Music. You can too via the BBC website.
I used one in a shop just today. It's not a new (as in just launched) product - a few months old.
There's a bunch of info on it, buried in this very pretty website Near as I can tell the encoding is the same, but I couldn't tell you about what the frequency intervals are, etc.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Stand clear of the doors. The doors are now closing.
You mean Streamripper?
You can also do so in XMMS, just use the disk writer output plugin.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
The BBC has been pushing its new DAB-only stations quite hard. We have approx 85% DAB coverage now, although the take-up is still only about 2%. However a lot of the DAB stations are also available via webcast and bundled with cable and satellite TV subscriptions.
I believe it's the UK government's ultimate goal to switch off analogue radio transmissions eventually, along with analogue TV and have everyone switch to digital TV and radio. I suspect this is going to take longer to accomplish than they want (by about 2010 IIRC) though.
So far, the Bug is full of them, bugs that is
The radio has problems reading SD cards sometimes, even the ones that it writes itself. The result is generally garbled filenames or unreadable files.
More seriously, the firmware shipped with the radio is having problems recording more than two thirds of the SD card. After 2/3 of the memory is used up, the recording starts to stutter (as if it's missing packets, which it probably is) or fail altogether.
Times recordings often fail, file deletion is buried in a submenu in a submenu...there's no fast forward or rewind on recordings. The sleep timer is hidden away, the 'joystick' control is unreliable.
And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it doesn't really record MP3. DAB radio is transmitted as MP2, the radio writes the stream directly to disk. If you want MP3 you have to upload to your computer, then convert. I think it can write mp3
All this will apparently be fixed when the new firmware becomes available. Which will be very soon, imminent in fact, honest.
I would post my sources, but their on PHP message boards, it'll get creamed by the slighest hint of a /.ing. It's easy enough to find if you're thinking of buying The Bug online, in the UK.
BB
I write commercial MPEG audio transcoders for a living.
You are a fool.
MP2 is superioir to MP3 and has countless vital features but more importantly...
MP3 = MPEG 1 Layer 3 audio
MP2 = MPEG 2
Yup! MPEG2 !!!!!!
MPEG2 is BETTER than MP3 so why the hell do you want to reencode it, most players play MPEG2.
And the iPOD from apple plays MPEG-2 AAC sudio stored in a wrapper file of MPEG-4 but it is still AAC MPEG-2
Mind you... the MPEG-2 this encodes is low bitrate 1997 style audio but still vastly superior to MP3 except for the highest frequencies (if any).
I have a preproduction Griffin RadioShark, they only a few days from shipping.
The unit I have works PERFECTLY and is the FASTEST way to switch from AM to FM that I know of. You can have AM and FM mixed in with each other in your presets and you can timeshift record.
I too usually listen to AM - I have been wanting such a product for a very long time.
Griffin will finally deliver VERY soon. They've had a number of problems with manufacturer getting the internals right.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Check out Diva GEM, I recently bought this one for my wife's birthday.
It's as small as cigarette lighter, it has MMC/SD slot supporting even 1GB cards (I tested myself). It also has FM radio, plays AAC/MP3/GSM-AMR/WAV and can record from radio or buil-in mic -- works as a voice recorder too. You can upload/download files from the card via reader, or directly from this device via USB 1.1 (read ~600KB/s, write ~300).
It works from exchangeable li-ion battery over 10h and you can recharge it from (included) USB and wallplug charger.
More expensive models have built-in Bluetooth which enables it to work as a headset for BT-enabled phone -- GEM automagically stops music and receives call.
I bought the model without BT and with only 32M internal flash (plus the MMC/SD slot) for ~$140, Kingston SD 512M card for about $100. Works like a charm.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
The general technology is called "In-Band, On-Channel." The implementation in the US is different from the the one in the rest of the world. In the USA, DAB technology is controlled by a company called iBiquity. It's incompatible with the world standard. In the rest of the world, the standard is Eureka 417. I found this explanation helpful.