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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?
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.
Stand clear of the doors. The doors are now closing.
"Oh, and it is sexy as hell."
Maybe it's just me, but odd-shaped packaging is cute for about 1 minute, then it is just a pain. You can't stack stuff on it, you can't push is flat up against your cubicle wall, etc.
If form-follows-function, fine. But if there is no reason for some odd shape, can't we have something more practical, less fragile and, frankly, less goofy looking? I wouldn't buy one of these things solely based on how it looks.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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 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
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.