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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 ?"
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
...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?
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...
I'd be willing to bet that XM has been an option for Ford and Chrysler as well...
Actually, Ford and Chrysler have partnered with Sirius. I don't know about Chrysler, but Ford doesn't push Sirius at all. You have to get a premium (Mach) radio for it to even be satellite-ready.
Sure, anytime!
I shouldn't have been so flip, especially about prog rock
Oh, you weren't. You message came across right, I was just adding to it. I guess I came off more "intense" than I was aiming for.
I probably completely abused the term progressive rock.
It's actually a very difficult term to pin down exactly. One person's progressive rock, is another person's plain old rock & roll. For instance, Spock's Beard is very different than Lacuna Coil, and the later has the more radio friendly sound and running times.
Another problem is that bands change over time. For instance, compare "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" era Genesis with "We Can't Dance" era Genesis, "Tales from Topographic Oceans" era Yes with "90125" era Yes, and "2112" era Rush with "Moving Pictures" era Rush. Sometimes the later incarnations are not considered very progressive. Many people have difficulty believing Genesis was a progressive band!
It's made worse, by the fact that the artists don't always see themselves as a progressive band. For instance, Porcupine Tree doesn't consider themselves progressive, but many people classify them as such. They have certainly made progressive music, but they have also changed their sound many, many times.
There are also several genres of progressive rock. You can have progressive metal and progressive folk, for instance.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
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.
You're really lucky if you manage to catch a top 40 song (in the hard rock genre) on any of their stations
You're persuading me to give XM serious thought. Avoiding Top 40 isn't a bug, it's a feature.
For example...the problem with "oldies" stations is that they're not oldies stations; they're oldies Top 40 stations. The only thing that keeps them from being as wretched as modern Top N stations is that they select their material from a time when radio was less specialized, so that they achieve some variety despite themselves. Even so, you'll never hear Quicksilver Messenger Service, or Pearls Before Swine on most oldies stations. Heck, you won't even hear the Nazz's "Hello, It's Me" as opposed to Todd Rundgren's solo version.
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.
First of, sir, you're obviously listening to the wrong stations. Unless you explore more than a couple of the available stations, yes, it may seem like they play music that is a bit more uncommon to hear than on normal broadcast radio-- but then again, broadcast radio rock MUST play the same music over and over (and over) again on the same station.
On XM, there is more than one "rock station" that would play music that broadcast stations must play on the same station, save some of your huge market cities where there may be a bit more selection of stations. XM offers quite a few different "genres" of rock stations-- Ethel plays songs from the alternative genre.. from Blink 182 to Nirvana. Boneyard plays your hard rock, which has a pretty huge fanbase...
Aww hell, just look for yourself. The description on the XM Radio [XMRadio.com] website does a fairly good job in explaining this anyway.
Are you on crack? I had the chance to play with one a few weeks ago, and it almost convinced me to go buy one. The Old Time Radio channel (of which there were two, btw) was playing stuff that probably hasn't been on the radio in decades. (And yes, I've caught a couple OTR shows on the radio) And the Audio Lab channel had stuff you'll _never_ hear on Clear Channel. I think you listened to the pop channel, and I'm sure that's intentionally like Clear Channel. But go find a real channel, and be amazed.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
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!
--
make install -not war
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.