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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."
First the US learns that the Brits have all the good sitcoms...and now Slashdot shows me that they have all the good radios as well.
Digital Audio Broadcasts? 85% coverage of the UK? Wicked radios? And it's for FREE!?!? XM ain't lookin' so hot right now...
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
Do people actually expect this to be released without a hitch? Look at all of the controversy currently surrounding TiVo and other PVRs. Now consider the fact that the RIAA will be fighting this flash memory tooth and nail. The Bug will allow people to listen to what they want, when they want. No more inane DJ banter, no more 10-minute commercial breaks between every song, no more screeching pop tarts (unless that's what people want to hear.) There is no way to secure this device against copying, no matter how hard they try. There's a way around every copy protection. This will allow flawless, portable, digital recordings off of the radio. Granted, it's what consumers want, but since when were consumers in control? I have a feeling this will incur the wrath of the RIAA and, therefore, the US government. Just wait, these Bugs will be banned within a matter of days.
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seems like the site is quite slow already.w w.thebug.com/+&hl=en
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:MzaBgZJufrYJ:w
I admit I haven't RTFA since the site is ./ed, but I have a question. Does this digital radio fill in the ID3 tags? Also, are they doing any watermarking of the mp3's?
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Stupid bastards. Notice this was never a problem when people were dubbing radio on to tapes. Leave it to the rest of humanity to find a good way of owning, storing, and organizing music, and then the RIAA says, "Hey, this is efficient and high quality. Better stop them while we can..."
we've had digital radio broadcasts for ~6 years now
and currently the amount of sold digital recievers countrywide is 0
honestly, the concept really needs some rethinking
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
The legendary British radio manufacturer Roberts, produce a similar device called the Gemini 1. I don't know if it's as "sexy" as The Bug (whatever that means) but Roberts' reputation in the field of portable radio manufacturer is second to none.
Now I love to bash clear channel as much as the next guy, but here in LA they launched a station called Indie 103 that is actually pretty damn good and while it does have some repeats, they pull out some deep cuts and b-sides that have impressed me. Much better than the other corporate rock station or NPR style hippie radio... I'm sure it's voice tracked and they are/will be cookie-cutter stations like this all over, but hey, it's still good music. Could it be that they're actually going after a slightly less giant market than the britney spears lovers? Hell must be getting chilly...
Yes, and no.
The Hauppaugg! "theater" card has a built in FM radio tuner, (model 401 card) so with the appropriate software or collection of software, you could schedule to record, and re-code to MP3, ogg vobis, WMA, or other audio format at your convienence. However that leaves out AM, and is not a Digital Radio tuner.
Presuming you can find an AM tuner card (the only thing that comes to mind at the moment is a card that acts as a scanner as well, and I can't recall its information) you could do this as well for AM. Again missing the Digital Radio stations. I seem to recall that the card I am thinking of is rather expensive, but it was a couple of years ago that I last looked at the idea, and there may be some of these cards available on ebay for a lot less than I recall.
Also presuming you can find a card that does the digital radio receiver functions you could probably do this as well with that card. I don't know what the availability of drivers for Linux users would be, but you should have no problems under Windows. I see a couple of links in earlier postings that would provide a possible link for you.
The primary problem with plugging a radio into a sound card is not the conversion of analog to digital, or anything like that, it's the fact that you have to manually re-tune the radio if you are going to record something on another station. That may be alright for you, but most others would be somewhat put out by that.
If you do go with the Hauppauge! card, I don't know what you have to do under Windows, but under Linux you will want to install the btaudio module, then you will use something lik Radio, or GTRadio to tune the station, and using either Jack, or one of the other audio tools run an output to whatever software you are going to use to convert from pcm audio to your favorite format. It can all be done as pipes, but I have not been able to do so myself.
Enjoy and take care.
-Rusty
You never know...
b) US broadcasters (in threory) are independant, and quite fond of the frequency they're on. In Europe, you have national broadcasters.
:)
no, in the UK we have local only channels that aren't available nationally, both on FM and DAB. I've had a dab radio for ages (I've got a sony 777es) and I agree, dab is great, but it's worth noting that while it can be better than FM, it's often not as lots of channels are multiplexed onto each frequency, so the more channels you shoehirn in, the lower the bitrate for each is. I think most stations are about 128k which is a bit disappointing, I've seen channels much lower though.
DAB is great for cars though (althogh I don't have a dab radio in my car alas) as the frequencies stay the same, just that different transmitters are time sliced so that they don't interfere with each other. that way your car can merely choose the strongest signal to play from and the driver hears no loss in audio (unless you plain drive out of range of a transmitter
got to admit, I don't like the looks of the bug although I'm sure it's great functionally.
dave
Went to the launch (at the Dali Gallery), wasn't completely sold. Got one. Got irritated by the bugs, but lived with them.
Just been upgrading the firmware on it (lets make everyone scream, it needs Windows to update the flash...), so now it has rewind and fast forward when playing back off SD card.
Lovely functionality, still undecided on the ergonomics, and I wish the SD slot was on the front.
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Recording Radio is legal, so would it make the MP3s recorded by the Digital Radio legal too? If some one put them out on P2P, would it be legal to download and play these MP3? How would one differentiate between such MP3s v/s the CD ripped versions?