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Portable Internet Radio to take on XM?
TheDude writes "A friend who works for a design company attended the Australian EDN awards last night and was impressed with one of the winners, in the wireless category, which was won by Grey Innovation for their Infusion device . It's a Linux based portable internet radio that streams Internet Radio over WiFi. Is this the future of Radio? Given the big push by XM and Sirus , the potential of Podcasting and now the "inFusion", in which direction is mass-audio-broadcast heading? And why isn't anyone really pushing Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB), like they have in the UK ?"
I've been wishing for this for a while. I spend a lot of time in urban areas and am pretty happy with my streaming options.
Yes, but does it run Lin... oh, wait
Unless you live on a college campus or in San Francisco, this is pretty much useless. Come back and try again once 802.16 becomes widespread.
http://209.235.176.54/reverse_evolutionblues.mp3
Best heard under Heavy surround sound because it hasn't been mixed yet.lol
However I live by words, and YES i do suck. But here is my take. And its free for you. You need surround sound and good stereo to appreciate it, but i give it to you. That way its still mine. :P
And yes I wrote this and performed all the instruments. So its mine to give.
I stream radio from the internet to my Audiovox SMT 5600 cell phone. Unlimited data plan so there is no charge for me other then the monthly.
I heard of some people streaming live tv through a home computer and a program called orb to their cell phone.
It looks like wireless media is here.
I wonder what would happen to one if you pried it open with a screwdriver after washing it...
Baseball; football? Sports sells.
I d=105622)
Howard Sterns sells (well, maybe not to Hyundai owners:
http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/News/article
Wifi Radio wont catch on until it's truly portable, i.e. you can listen to it in your car like satellite radio, and that wont happen until WiFi is everywhere and that wont happen until cities start funding WiFi municipally and that wont happen. At least not if Verizon, et al. have their way.
here's what i want: something to jack into my ipod, that plays (and maybe lets me record) internet radio, like the fine soma fm.
i guess wifi is the only way to deliver this, airtunes style.
this functionality could be built into future ipods and other music players. i'd pay more for it.
Never underestimate the power of millions of Howard Stern fans signing up for Sirius all at the same time.
Sirius will dominate the radio market starting at the end of this year.
Portable internet radio is a great idea, and may eventually become the de facto standard, but it's not going to be anytime in the near future.
I stream radio from the internet to my Audiovox SMT 5600 cell phone. Unlimited data plan so there is no charge for me other then the monthly.
How much does an unlimited data plan cost compared to a service such as XM Radio?
Grey Innovation has a keen idea, but the implementation is not quite right. WiFi is great for bounded areas, like a house or a college campus, but it's not really well-suited to situations in which you need truly mobile IP access. For that, I think the new high-speed mobile IP protocols, such as EDGE, WCDMA/UMTS and EVDO are much better. Right now you can get unlimited EDGE IP traffic from Cingular for $15/month if you know what you are doing.
Internet radio is also a very good application when done well (check the radio stations in iTunes if you haven't already), but you can do a lot more than just radio if you have Internet access. With Internet access you can also have music on demand. Rhapsody, Napster or the new Yahoo! Music Unlimited all provide this for a small subscription fee of $5-$10 US per month - much less than XM or Sirius charges. Their catalogues are pretty sizable, over 1 million tracks each.
The key is to link this all together with a reasonable user interface. It would manifest itself in the form of a device (either standalone or built into an automobile) capable of tuning into these radio streams, or connecting to one of the music-on-demand services, with a Bluetooth interface using the Dial-Up Networking profile. Tether that to your Bluetooth-capable mobile phone, and voila. Instant kick-ass.
If you want a high bit rate and stereo then the BBCs DAB broadcasts won't always be what you expect - take a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/digitalradio/faqs/answer_03c. shtml for some of them. A quick search will find you plenty of other pages detailing the shortcomings of the current set-up.
The funny thing about this though is that broadcast => someone has to decide what the more popular channels are => corporate control => will never be as popular or as cheap as P2P / intelligence-at-the-edges. So even though unicast streaming to everyone is much less effecient, it'll still eventually be cheaper. Stick THAT in your pipe and smoke it.
I'd like to see a wifi MP3 player that could download radio playlists. Whenever you're near a hotspot, it would grab the playlist for the next hour or so and download the songs. You then have an hour of fresh music before you have to run into another hotspot. Of course legal issues would complicate producing such a player, but maybe a clever hack could improve the functionality of the player in the article.
Been waiting for something like this for a long time. Now it's going to be a possibility to listen to stuff that's actually good on the radio now, instead of the three same music styles you get nowadays, being classic rock, new shit-rock, and hip hop.
It's only a matter of time before we still "podcasting" audio/video. Am I correct on this?
Sorry, this was phrased real badly.
Actually, LA is a perfect example of a city where this wouldn't. Unlike NY, the "city" has no center, it's just a huge semi-dense, mostly lo-rise sprawl of thoroughly mixed commercial, residential, and industrial areas. There'll never be more than a patchy ad-hoc WiFi system here in Los Angeles for the same reason we won't ever have a decent public transportation system. There is no heart to the city where you can get a reasonable benefit for your infrastructure investment. Either you spend billions to put a WiFi hub on every third street light, or you got nuthin'...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Areas outside the US... Who knows. They listen to really weird shit music anyway.
What and Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Nelly, 50 cent, etc are good music?
I'm an American, and I happen to think the best music comes from Europe. The worst from US.
I hope ArmageddonMan of Beefstormposse fame gets one of these. He's fucking hillarious on the air, tho I'm probably the only one here who's ever heard of the BSP..
You want an Internet Radio to tune into? Try this one. Straight out of Canada... (With one band from Egypt.)
www.newdor.com
All the music is available for purchase directly from the site. We offer live DJs on a schedule we're currently working out. It's all independent music you've never heard before, and we've got an archive of our live broadcasts so you can listen when we're not broadcasting.
-Andrew Abbass
no more webaddresses in my sig, ok?
I only listen to radio in my car. Thats why I have Sirius, I can get it anywhere with basically no interruptions. This stuff is more of a niche product for indie productions, but really isn't for the mainstream audience.
File this under "Just Because We Can Doesn't Mean We Should." For on-demand streaming, great. But using a packet-switched, short-range wireless IP network to do broadcast audio is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard of. A good way to broadcast radio would be to put a single transmitter really high up where millions of people could have line-of-sight reception of the same transmission. If only we had a way to put an antenna up so high that we could all see it...
Oh sure - like that's ever gonna catch on...
One of the only things I really miss about ditching my contract job in Indianapolis and moving back to Michigan was listening to the Big Dumb Show on the drive to and from work. If this "radio" could make it easy to grab a chunk of show and listen to it while traveling, it could have potential.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
That's like the 20th post with the same message you've added to this conversation. Stop advertising in the messages. Get an editor to post an advertisement.. I mean story, for you.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Look at his user page: morlock_man
Every single post of his is an advertisement for that site. Guess what site I'm never going to?
I guess his advertisements are going to have the inverse effect than the one he wanted. I guess that's what you get when you post on a site that advertises the fact that it's for intelligent people.
I doubt it will take off until widespread wifi is installed, until then though it may be relevent in an office environment, where your boss can record some announcement or instructions and you can access those from anywhere in the building or campus.
Wow, can't believe it took until the second reply to point out the quality of US music. FWIW, the only decent music comes out of the UK: Eric Clapton, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, etc, etc.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I recently bought a new car that was equipped with XM radio and a free 3 month trial. After 1 month in, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to sign up. It's like they didn't get the RIAA contract that the regular stations have. Their general selection of rock and hard rock stations is atrocious. It's all music from artists I've never heard of, and Dokken and Ratt's best hits, although I was unaware they had any. You're really lucky if you manage to catch a top 40 song (in the hard rock genre) on any of their stations; and if it is one, it's just the same track they repeat of that artist every 24 or 48 hours. I'd take the single hard rock station in my area (KROCK 92.3 FM NYC) over all of XM's channels any day of the week. Bring on the alternatives!
While it may be nice for around the house, it wouldn't replace XM or Sirius. I got XM when I bought a new Accord a couple months back. It's terrific. I drive 10 miles to/from work and regularly much farther on the weekends. I dont have to worry about loosing stations or reception problems (except under tunnels). WiFi radio isn't suitable for this. Not to mention, if there were that much wireless coverage, what a waste of bandwidth it would be.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
Clear Channel should get some republican senators ...or something like that.
to lobby the FCC to put a stop to this sort of thing...or regulate it
Choice confuses and frightens people. Industry and conservative government should help give people easier choices.
I'm just laughing. I check out www.weedshare.com. Anyone can do this an make money from the music, not the advertising. Just apply for a license.
no more webaddresses in my sig, ok?
It's good that these words will be here for a while.
no more webaddresses in my sig, ok?
Yeah, WiFi doesn't even do much for short haul people unless they spend most of their time within reach of a mesh.
XM sounds very nice but I'm really not ready for it, I have other priorities. Maybe when my iPod breaks, but I'm hoping to be able to use it for a long time. The current portable XM players are more than twice the bulk of an iPod, so there needs to be some improvement in that regard.
Maybe if there was a merge of the two, like it would switch to WiFi if inside a large steel building when reception gets bad, but I bet most of that sort of infrastructure may be for business use, too many people using WiFi might simply degrade the performance of the network too much.
...why isn't anyone really pushing Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB), like they have in the UK ?
Because DAB is shared across all stations. They take the spectrum and use wavelength division multiplexing and time division multiplexing to spread all of the stations with digital broadcasts across the spectrum. This allows high station density and no problems associated with signal drop out from distance nodes. However, this situation requires cooperation between competitors vying for listeners, something that is nearly impossible to achieve in the fiercly independent business environment of the USA.
The US alternative is Digital Audio Radio (DAR) using In-Band On-Channel (IBOC) broadcasting. IBOC uses a station's existing carrier frequency and puts the digital signal in the low-power extremeties of the carrier as mandated by the FCC. This is not as efficient as DAB because you don't eliminate the issue of signal dropout from fequency nodes, and you may suffer from interference when listening to the analog signal. The good thing is that setup costs are much lower compared to DAB and, as is true with all digital audio radio situations, the digital signal carries further with lower power than analog.
So why isn't IBOC popular? It's not as robust as DAB and there is little incentive for stations to switch. Who has a DAR receiver in their car? Here's hoping that one day this will be a reality.
Shouldn't You expect more from your DJ?
Whatever. If you like classical, it's Europe. If you like jazz, it's America. Prog rock, UK. Hard rock, America. Etc. If you like crap, take your pick. Next time you feel compelled to say something as stupid as "the only decent music comes out of the UK" I suggest you make use of the "Post Anonymously" button. That's what it's there for.
I used to trade cassettes by mail with a friend for years. did my own collections on cassette for the car -- in fact, with access to broadcast studios and music libraries, in high school I was doing that for the bus trips on debate. currently, I have CDs in the car and my iPod for exercise and work.
now, that's the original alternative radio format, and you control it yourself, all of it, every bit. with shuffle and random play options on most everything except linear tape products, it's truly random (most-played on the 'pod is about the same as top rock radio.)
radio when it works has always been a locally-focussed medium... the jukebox aspect is the filler for the local chatter, news, information, sports, and the like. radio when it doesn't comes off the big bird and you get two drop-in spots at the half hour and can donut the top of the hour.
the point is, none of those guys do what you are used to. it once upon a time was a sure thing to expose you to new venues, music types, and new songs and artists, when you could have beach boys bumped up against patsy cline and followed with the frank chacksfield orchestra and nilsson.
three new songs a week on any top-chart station is all the new you get, and it's all of a sameness.
radio has to get back to local to save itself, and I mean without all the invective of screech radio. until then, I format it myself, which I have done since before I strained the ether with my college radio hour.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Given yesterday's Slashdot item about radio, the next few years will be an interesting time indeed for the world of radio. Under dual assault from satellite and online, terrestial radio is truly going to take a beating, and it will take more than upgrading to HD radio and offering localalized programming and news bites to staunch the bleeding. If terrestrial radio is to survive, it will have to exercise significantly greater imagination and (pardon the word) innovation than what most radio execs have exhibited so far...
and i only ever use it for the Opie and Anthony show.
.... something that goes down very fast pending a stupid business decision[see: 1/2 a billion dollars for howard stern + fewer subscribers than xm]).
u siness&article=UPI-1-20050323-16064200-bc-us-hyund ai-xm.xml), hardly braggable.
i know a very sizeable portion of subscribers are there for the same reason.
and consider how many sirius owners are buying that equipment just for stern, and will likely hardly explore the service after receiving it (which they won't have long to do, because sirius is going down faster than
the market for satellite radio is about 4-5 million big including xm and sirius, relatively small compared to ipod owners and internet radio streaming listeners. and neither sat radio services have eeked out a signifcant presence in the place where it really matters - the auto industry. the furthest it's gotten is xm included in hyundais (http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=B
Fortunately for you, I have personal convictions against using "troll", "flamebait", and "overrated" when I mod. If anything, you deserve all three at once but I won't give you the satisfaction. I guess that's the conservative side of me that believes that all people have a right to say what they want - even moronic and ignorant statements like yours.
" It's a Linux based portable internet radio that streams Internet Radio over WiFi. Is this the future of Radio? Given the big push by XM and Sirus , the potential of Podcasting and now the "inFusion", in which direction is mass-audio-broadcast heading? "
I'll say one thing which I'm sure the majority will deny. We like being consumers, regardless of how the goods are delivered, or who's doing the delivering.
The majority of what will be carried by all this new-fangled technology, will not be mass individualism, all banging pots and pans together. But pretty much old wine in new bottles.
Maybe someday the pool will be bigger, and the overall structure will be flatter. But a tool doesn't a talent make. And all the technology hasn't solved the human problem of how to make more artists. Only how to empower the one's you already have.
"Linux based portable internet radio that streams Internet Radio over WiFi."
From TFA, it's a radio 'receiving' device. It doesn't stream, it receives a stream. It's the appliance nature, like a portable player, that makes it special. connecting to a stream using a laptop over WiFi isn't that big a deal. We were messing around with it a couple of years ago. We couldn't figure out how to do broadcast from the AP's though.
'future of radio'?
Radio need not be real time. Podcasting has a huge delay and it's still seems to be popular based on what I've been reading. The problem with distribution on the internet is cost and at least for radio, the answer is relaying. With most high speed connections offering 256-284kbps upstream it's a little tight as the tree branches very slowly and there's not a lot of room for overhead of people coming on and off line.
RANT ON!
It's being done on purpose. The old line content distributors want to retain control of their provider-consumer model. As soon as the consumers become the providers, the old line guys believe they will be screwed. This it the only reason we have these crappy upstream speeds. Cost is a drop in the bucket compared to what they spend to acquire and keep customers.
The BIG PROBLEM is that there are all sorts of really neat applications for distribution by and for 'the people' that are not being developed in the USA because there is no market so long as the stranglehold on bandwidth exists. IMO these applications would make the overall pie much bigger and the old line guys would benefit along with everyone else. The BIG PREBLEM is that here we have an area that's begging for development and products and the economic gain is going to be realized elsewhere. The development is going to happen elsewhere. Hell, M Powell and the friggin BPL crap is still 'broadcast' mindset. The govt. says USA innovation is important and focus on broad band technology but only form the corporate to consumer POV. What needs to happen is for a mess O folk to write their elected officials and explain what's what about this big economic 'thing' that's not going to happen here and why.
It's not just music. It's video. It's other stuff we haven't thought of yet.
"why isn't anyone really pushing Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB)"
Look at all the trouble getting HDTV through, even with govt. mandates. DAB will be even harder because the difference in quality between FM stereo and DAB isn't enough. Where's the compelling reason? Unlike HDTV, DAB allows more stations in the FM band. The few companies that control most of FM certainly don't want moresegmentation in the markets because it costs more money for catering. They certainly don't want competition.
actually being LA, wouldn't putting a tiny little one in every car work very well?
Not Free SF Reader
What, you mean hip-hop and rap aren't the highest form of musical sophistication and lyrical construct?
"However I live by words, and YES i do suck. But here is my take. And its free for you. You need surround sound and good stereo to appreciate it, but i give it to you. That way its still mine. :P
And yes I wrote this and performed all the instruments. So its mine to give.[Emphasis mine]"
Ladies and genteman. I give you "The New, and Improved" business model. Have fun!
I am happy to say that it is twice as good as reported.
forgetting that the government lives off of us.
Remember that when the government does anything, they pay for it via forced confiscation of people's income. That's a perfectly reasonable (or at least unavoidable) thing to do for many things
For a variety of reasons, whenever the government does something, it generally costs more than it would if the private sector did it. For instance, schooling. So, even if the government funds the project only from those whom it would benefit, everyone would most likely pay more.
For myself, I'd like to save that sort of magic for the important stuff that wouldn't otherwise happen.
"Every single post of his is an advertisement for that site. Guess what site I'm never going to? "
Ahhh! The dark side of the "New and Improved Business Model" that everyone brags about, every time radio, or the RIAA get mentioned. A multitude of talented, and not so talented, all clamoring for our ear. Vainly the audiance searching an ever deeper stack, for that one needle that makes it all worthwhile.
Makes you wish for the "Good old days".
We liberals have utter contempt for anyone who doesn't live in NY or LA, or another american metropolis which emulates either.
Everyone else is a redneck hick who watches NASCAR and shops at Wal-mart, and are all incredibly stupid, and need the brilliant intellectual elite of folks like Whoopi Goldberg and Rosie O'Donnel to set them straight.
I had an idea similar to this in that it would be so kick ass to cruise around town while listening to my favorite stream on some Linux portable. Sadly total coverage wifi is not here yet.
"So whats my point? Me, a lifelong geek, no longer gives a flying rats ass about the future of "digital media". I'll keep my analog cable, FM radio, and CD player for as long as they continue to work."
But, but. How are we going to "bring down the man", if everything remains analog?
I thought it was the conservative side (ala Janet Jackson overreaction, FCC censorship, etc) of you that would make you want to mod someone down.
I've been keenly interested in music all my life, I've played in bands, collected music, got to know the musicians and now (for the second time) am getting ready to launch a internet radio station myself.
I follow the music and technology closely (systems administrator by trade) and have followed both XM and Sirius with a good deal of interest. But there's the catch: the reason I've followed them with such great interest is because the right alternative hasn't been available. And thats (aside from the desktop) internet radio.
Why is internet radio the right format? Because its a totally open system. Look at programs like Off The Hook for example. Thats the kind of programming that couldn't exist in a closed system, but on the internet the field is wide open.
Why on earth we'd want anything less then that is beyond me. We've already had our closed system, its called the public airwaves. Everyone knows Clear Channel perfected it, but they aren't to blame the system was flawed from the start. Anyone can have a website and thats all it takes to run a broadcast.
I don't know anything about this product, but I do know I'm a firm believer that internet radio is the answer to a question a lot of us have been asking ourselves for as long as we've been listening to music.
Props to XM and Sirius for broadening the horizon, but I can't see their (still limited) approach as much more then a stop-gap measure until WIFI broadband becomes ubiquitous enough that people can tune into their favorite radio station or flip on something they've never even heard before.
If I sound a little giddy its because my favorite syles of music aren't available at your local Virgin Mega Store, in fact since the arts and music explosion on the internet I can't even find most of my favorite bands down at the local alternative record store and I live in a major metropolitan city.
Even with all the existing media outlets combined they don't even begin to scratch the surface of whats available. And theres a lot of good stuff out there.
Sorry for going overboard. I feel passionate about it. This is a very exciting time in general and as a art and music lover doubly so. The beauty of the internet is that it's so totally open and I've been doing this for a long time now and I still find myself saying "wow".
Don't ever put this genie back in the bottle.
Quack, quack.
I have been streaming audio via the internet on my pocket PC phone for over a year. What do you need? A Pocket PC phone, T-mobile unlimited data (GPRS) an FM transmitter or tape adapter and links to online audio streams. I recently drove in Florida on I75 for 4 hours with only 4 signal drops!!!! I was listening to Air America Radio BTW.. (www.airamericaradio.com) Worked like a champ! You can also use ORB. This is a (currently nearly stable) service that allows you to stream your own MP3s from home... Now there are some things they need to get going.. but all in all its pretty cool. They also provide links to external content!!!! Maybe I should post a how to guide.. but.. its pretty easy.. BeDammit
because DAB is rubbish. Seriously. I'm in the UK, and the implementation is very poor.
It has worse sound quality than a good quality FM signal (yay, 128kbps MP2), the radios are still prohibitively expensive and aside from the fact the stations have a longer range so you can pick up another dozen or so, it doesn't seem worthwhile.
There is also no killer app to make me want one. Personally, I'm still happy with my cheap FM radio and it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
Recently I was asked to see what the possibilities are to encode data from a radio tuner card into an (for example) mp3 stream.
I only found cards which could do one channel at the same time.
My question is, does somebody know radio tuner cards which can listen to / encode more than one channel at the time?
bash$
Quote: "Is this the future of radio". No
Well I'm very happy with my DAB radio. I'm in central London and I get a better signal than FM, plus I can pause and record programs on a memory card.
Guess it works for some of us...
Toby
I haven't had the opportunity to listen to XM or Sirus yet, so I can't compare, but one thing I definitely like about streaming radio compared to regular FM is the music. Meaning they actually play music. There is no stupid DJ filling half of his 2 hour morning show with really stupid, naive, and/or ill-informed rambling, mixed in with phone calls from dim-witted listeners.
Not that DJ's are bad. On rare occassion they can quite pleasant. There are only two stations I've found in my area where the DJ's tell you what songs their playing, toss in some brief trivia, and give you some local news. Unfortunately, my favorite (Oldies 97.1, KISN FM) just got dropped onto the AM band by its owners. So that leaves one with decent sound quality.
With global distribution from any point and relatively low cost, I doubt Clear Channel stands a chance of dominating streaming the way it has the FM band.
That's Sirius, not Sirus.
I just recently got a Sirius radio. If kicksass. Wherfe i live and as i drive i get somewhat spotty reception, on the way to work it goes out 1 or 2 times. But i live out in the middle of nowhere. I have taken it to 'town' (nashville) and its very nice having the terrestrial feature, im sure XM offers it too, but its nice to be able ot go inside and not have access to a window and still pick up the kickass radio.
I chose sirius over xm becaus eof the jam band scene. Im very pleased with wha ti hear. It plays some of my favorite (lots of live shit) and also a lot fo stuf i havent heard. Which is v ery nice.
Psy
"the market for satellite radio is about 4-5 million "
That's amazing! Because together XM and Sirius already have over 5 million subscribers, which means they're selling more than there's a market for.
Amazing!
No seriously, your information is already dated. Every manufacturer has already partnered with one of the services...I don't know all of them, but BMW is Sirius, GM is XM, Honda is XM, Toyota is XM, Ford is Sirius, Daimler-Chrysler is Sirius... I think its more likely the market for Satellite radio is closer to 30-40 Million, which is a huge dent for conventional radio in that people who pay money for satellite radio are likely to actually listen to it.
What will happen in satellite is that next year, Stern will go to Sirius, which will have an impact of 2-3M subscribers for sirius. That's 2.5M * $13/M * 12 months in a year. That's $390M/year and they're paying stern $100M a year. That's a no-brainer in ANYBODY's book.
And once these guys pass the 10M mark for subscribers, you're going to see rates start to come down a little. My guess is that they'll settle in at $8/M.
That's a pretty strong indictment of how badly Clear Channel and the FCC have f*cked up terrestrial radio.
(p.s. my guess is you work for one of the broadcasters...probably CC. Hope clear channel goes down along with all their crappy horrible radio stations).
Elite conservatives, too. Of course LA with a few Walmarts (none now) and a NASCAR track (OC's Long Beach Grand Prix and impromptu "The Fast and Furious" street races are it) would be even more kickass. An NFL team wouldn't hurt either. I hate to say it but, if we are talking about enjoying life and having fun, the liberals may be right about NYC and LA
I bet the InFusion device is missing the same thing as every other WiFi device (eg. the wireless ZyXel VoIP phone) .. it can't authenticate on the wireless authentication gateway that is at universities, pay-"Hot spots" etc.
How about some sort of XMLRPC protocol, so this authentication could be automated? It still sucks that I have to fire up my browser to enter my username/password, which is store in there anyway..
But we're going to get one of these for the home stereo:
Roku Soundbridge. Thank the gods it works with my router.
Convetional radio sucks. Especially the local stations. Moreso now that ClearChannel has a cookie-cutter KISS-FM here.
The wife likes listening to the 80s channel and I like listening to jazz and traditional irish folk/pop. The latter of which have no market or stations here in Austin, TX. YOU try to give culture to this place. It doesn't work for the most part.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
First off all the satelite radio services suck. There is no diversity of music. Just the same crap that Clear Channel and the other big conglomerates push on us. Secondly http://slimdevices.com/ has a really great OS product called SlimServer. Works over ANY networking that can be attached to a PC. Supports Linux and has a great hardware player.
Meddle thou not in the affairs of Dragons, for thou art crunchy and with most anything.
You are wrong, and the proof of what I say is all around you--internet writers (bloggers, if you will).
Before the internet, if you wanted to read some deceent writing, you had to go to the library or pay for it--newspaper, magazine, book, etc. Now all you have to do is fire up the browser, and viola, informed and talented writers are freely available. As a longtime reader myself, and a published writer as well, I can assure you that I what I get on the Net is every bit as good (or better) as what I got back in the pre-Internet days. You just have to be able to navigate the Net moderately well.
So, I see no reason why music and radio talent should not be easily available on Internet radio. Remember the aggregating, filtering and disseminating powers of tte internet. All we need is maybe a hundred such unpaid talents, and then you have enough for the whole world.
Realize that even just one unpaid radio talent can feed all the internet radio listeners in the world, given enough mirrors, bandwidth, etc. And also recall that there are about 500 million people in the english speaking world. I think we can manage to scrape up enough free internet radio talent.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
What metric are you using to determine if music is good? I'm using the "people like it" scale.
Get XM radio. I used to listen to mp3s but now I don't even bother. There is nothing to "get going" - it just works.
On Sprint's CDMA cellular network, one can reasonably reliably listen to 56kbps shoutcast streams with a smart phone such as the treo. Lower bitrates are even more reliable. Sprint's unlimited data plan is $15/mo on top of your regular phone charges.
This can't compete with XM on quality and obviously not on signal reception. But a treo with a wifi card would beat the device referenced in this article hands down, in my opinion.
I think you need to check out Irate radio, it's similar to your idea. If you had a portable that ran Java and had WiFi, this would be your idea, for the most part. It might not gracefully recover if you changed wireless hotspots, lost connection, etc.
It's a great alternative to streaming if you have a high latency connection, since you keep your downloads, and the client plays only songs that have finished downloading. Note that the artists will be unknowns 99.9% of the time, due to the licensing issues.
Best of all, it tries to learn from your preferences and download music you would like.
Rule of the open mind
People who are resistant to change cannot resist change for the worst.
In my work I spend about 30% of my time driving and 30% of my time walking; and I have a diminished attention span. So I listen to Sirius in my car, and internet streams on my Verizon Audiovox XV6600 using their unlimited EV-DO network here in the Chicago Burbs.
I had tried the same thing with a Treo650 on Cingular's EDGE but encountered nothing but headaches with the Treo. I've been a Palm fanboi since `97 and sadly the Treo650 changed all of that. It was completely unreliable even in factory settings just being used as a phone! The damn thing crashed when I received phone calls, when I received Emails/SMS, and once got into a reboot loop when I had the nerve to receive a SMS while on a phone call. I had it for 2 weeks and unable to resolve my troubles.
There are a few things I should warn about though in going the route I have. This burns through an amazing amount of battery, especially when used in conjunction with my iTech Bluetooth Stereo Headset which I highly recommend to anyone thinking of pursuing this route. It instantly makes this the coolest portable music route to take. But you'll need to also invest in a much bigger battery, I personally opted for a 2200mAh Li-Ion but there are 3300mAh also available. Of course you'll need a stylish case that can comfortably fit the engorged battery. My 2200 barely fits in my Covertec. Lastly, you'll need a decent SD Card if you don't have one already. You will be amazed at how much difference a spare gig of storage can make, and this actually makes for a nice portable video player as well.
Let us review the cost of convergence:
Audiovox XV6600 = $600
Stereo Bluetooth Headset = $70
2200mAh Li-Ion Battery = $80
Covertec Leather Case = $40
Corsair 1Gig SD Card = $80
Never being alone in the harshness of meatspace without the warm buzz of the collective = Priceless.
There are some things money can't buy, for everything else resistance is futile.
This is where most of these type of things fall short for me since I like to listen to the BBC and others who only do Real.
/. some time ago, look promising but its not clear if their product is really available. They seem to be supplying OEM's but I'm not sure who.
Reciva who were featured on
you are also probably one of those crazy ex-pat types who love the advantages of this country (uh seriously, we have amazon,netflix,tivo, and a ton actual non internet related things which are supersweet), but want to move out so hard. "god, the US is so lame. im moving to australia, or europe, or anywhere where they are sane". guess what buster, the U.S. is sweet even with all the crap thats happening around us (ie, our shitty president)
on another note, people crib about music as if they can make some actual claims about it. did you know that everyone who claims to like country music but hates like... modern rock and roll just is being blind to history? music isnt original, its stolen back and forth and given a new style and spin and then its traded back and forth again. i mean, its obvious. music evolves and devolves, etc. gah. troll or not, you cant deny it. "i hate american music" what a crock of shit. "european music is so superior" half of those popular european acts are just emulating major american singers who are just emulating them who are emulating their idols from years gone by! stop hating on popular music. god! just... just end yourselves.
Considering that both XM and Sirius carry Air America, your idea is quite useless and lame. Plus, with XM, I can switch over to the old Alternative station and listen to Foo Fighters and Cake when Al Franken gets boring.
what does it matter what OS it runs?
Britney Spears has sold ~100 million albums you dumbass. She rocks!
I was talking to some industry peers the other day and I boldly (perhaps ignorantly? :) ) said that I thought in the long run, the Cell phone companies stood as the biggest threat to Satellite based radio.
My thinking is that since bandwidth to cell phones is increasing, latency is dropping, and some of the amazing G4 stuff going on outside the US; it's only a matter of time before you can buy an aftermarket in dash radio with a cell phone built in whose primary purpose is receiving streams.
How killer would it be to have all the eclectic streams on the Internet available to you in your vehicle?
I can only imagine the laws they'll try to push through to keep us from being distracted...
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
Seems like anyone with an existing IP satellites could get into the satellite radio business. Is it possible to receive these satellites while moving or do they need a big dish? The radio stream could be sent out on UPD to remove the need for two way communication and make it into a broadcast.
Because it's a count of units shipped and not units sold?
Until radio Internet access forms an uninterrupted coverage area, Internet radio will be relocatable, not truly "mobile". Like the difference between a "luggable" KayPro PC and a Palm Pilot, only convenient mobility will be palatable to the masses (not just geeks, early adopters, and scattered specialists). That limitation means not only that cost will remain prohibitive until industrial scales are marketable, but that the network won't really be populated enough to really be social - except as an echo chamber of the same hackers and antisocial worker drones we've already got on Slashdot ;). That might have been better for Usenet, before AOL piped into the Internet, but the path to riches and humanization runs right through the washed masses.
WiFi (and its descendants) will be just the place to settle down, or breathe free. But hotspots will be spotty for some time, as our society's P2P buildout continues inexorably, but unplanned. The way this environment will reach a basic mobility platform includes interspot coverage by barely-adequate 3G "phone" networks, with roaming among them and hotspots, interchangeably. Motorola has announced a WLAN/GSM roamer due by Q32005. BT promises a WiFi/GSM "phone" by Q42005, and is launching a Bluetooth/GSM project. These vendors are trying to both extend cell/PCS service to enterprise WLANs (SCCAN), and roam VoWLAN connections to cell/PCS networks (UMA). And the IEEE already has a new "WiFi" descendant, WMM, that promises better roaming and QoS over the WLANs, for seamless telephony interop.
The upshot for devices like this cute little inFusion Internet radio is popularity well beyond shoppers at ThinkGeek. Which bigger global market means cheaper devices, easier to use, and more jobs for geeks. But it also means a bigger audience for content, within which niche producers can find supporting consumer scale for even the least popular content. So the leveled multimedia playing field can support people who tie other people together across the globe. Let's get it on!
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make install -not war
Their inFusion demo says it can record the streams. Much streaming content is copyrighted, though not all, which allows streams but not copies. How are we to know that we're not legally able to copy incoming content, without some associated metadata at least whether a copyright is asserted? Just because content's copyright is reserved from the consumer doesn't mean the consumer can't copy it (fair use, etc). So the recording device has no business blindly violating our rights by enforcing the copyright assertion. But without that, we'd have to at least assume that it's copyrighted, unless there's some way to detect a less restrictive license. A centralized database would, in reality, be incomplete and more complex than including that info in the content data itself. Have we finally realized that the "Broadcast Flag", abhorred on Slashdot, is actually in our own interest?
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make install -not war
Dude... XM radio and Sirius has a monthly fee XM radio and Sirius pump you their stuff. The solution I mentioned... Is all your stuff, you can host your own MP3s with Orb. BTW ppl GSPlayer is great for shoutcast streams.
you are also probably one of those crazy ex-pat types who love the advantages of this country (uh seriously, we have amazon,netflix,tivo, and a ton actual non internet related things which are supersweet), but want to move out so hard
All I said was the music is bad here, and you assume all of this? Wow.
I do want to move, good guess. But only to California. I dislike the whole president deal, the (MP|RI)AA, big corporation stuff, etc, but that's not going to get me to move out of the country.
half of those popular european acts are just emulating major american singers who are just emulating them who are emulating their idols from years gone by!
Another assumption. Wow, good job man. None of the European music I listen to even have words. There is no way for them to be emulating American singing if they don't sing at all.
Most, if not all, of the people I know that listen to American music listen to "Top 100" stations. I don't think people in America ACTUALLY LIKE the music they listen to, they listen to it because they are told it's popular music by radio stations.
I'm not saying that about everyone, I'm sure there are people that like that sort of music, and that's fine, but don't listen to the top of the charts music stations and make it your only source of music for your entire life.
I think you are looking at the Sirius units. XM has a reciever that is portable and will fit in your hand. It has a battery and a internal antenna so you can listen as you are taking a walk. It also has the ability to record 4 or 5 hours of programming for playback at a later time.
Check it out. They are awesome. http://xmradio.com/myfi/index.jsp
roche
Bah Humbug!
I have one of these already. It's called a "WiFi-equipped laptop."
Seriously, this device isn't going to change anything because it relies on WiFi, which typically has no range. You can't even walk down the street and keep listening to the station. Even the web page linked above says "when used at a WiFi hotspot." If we want a true roaming Internet radio device, it's going to have to be satellite or WiMax or something else other than WiFi.
yay britney
You haven't quite got the hang of the moderation system yet, have you?
/. equivalent of "LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!! ME TOO!!!!!!!"
Either that, or you've just used the
You're mostly right.
But you miss an important point.
That Plasma EDTV for the most part looks better than most of the HDTV's out there for a very fundamental reason: nobody broadcasts in anything other than 720p. Comcast doesn't do 1080i.
So what you've got is a plasma (which inherently looks flashier in the studio) up against some HDTV could put the EDTV plasma to shame, except that nobody has any *content* at 1080i. So you're left to compare a plasma versus non-plasma, plus the plasma hangs on the wall. Add that up and you've got people making a very rational decision... buy an EDTV plasma for $2k at costco. Its actually a good decision in the current climate.
Because the airwaves can only accommodate a finite number of broadcasts, even if we bother to increase this (satellite radio anyone?) we are still limited and in the case of XM or Sirius who do I talk to if I want my broadcast to be available? How well will that scale as more people take interest in broadcasting?
Right now Shoutcast.com alone is listing 8,751 stations. Thats just *one* portal.
I define 'closed' as being limited by available resources. You provide college radio as an alternative, but thats just one alternative station per regional market: shoutcast lists 1000's. Do you see the difference?
Quack, quack.
I live in a rural area of Canada, and having a constant wifi area not around my house is virtually non existant. I do have XM and I can get it anywhere I go. I drive 200 metres out of my driveway and this solution is gone for me. The two just can't compete.
A great way to thwart the RIAA/FCC supression of Internet Radio stations via their little gimmick with forcing people to keep track of songs and pay double royalties for each one played would be to have a grass-roots movement of bands creating songs that have a Creative Commons Copyright... so the songs can be played for free by anyone, but if some Corporation wants to make money off the song, THEY are the ones who have to pay. This would also be a boost for street musicians who have no contracts with the big music industry.
But he doesnt have to pay for XM or Sirius, in this case...
And why isn't anyone really pushing Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB), like they have in the UK ?
for basically the same reason we have five different incompatible underengineered digital mobile phone systems, rather than one that really works: because the Reagan administration transformed the government agency responsible for spectrum management in the USA into a committee of lawyers obsessed with spectrum license revenue maximization, to the exclusion of any kind of prescriptive role in, or enforcement of, engineering standards.
When it comes to engineering, the FCC just gives industry what it wants. That's how we keep winding up with turkeys like IBOC and ATSC.
XM and Sirius each have only 12.5 mhz of bandwidth.
That's not much room at all for tons of broadcast channels.
XM and Sirius are definitely cool, but I kind of see it as beta vs vhs. I'd be more interested in a service that doesn't lock you into hardware e.g. this internet radio.