USB Dongle Records Web, FM Radio

rah1420 writes "Gizmag just wrote about "Instant FM Music," a USB dongle that plugs into your computer's USB Port and records FM and Web Radio stations. You can record the playlist, tag the songs for easy playback, all without that nasty DRM." Nice and cheap, although who knows if the software is any good. That would be a neat device to see hacked for things like MythTV.

Comments

Useless for me, but almost the right direction?

[dada21]

This is useless for me. The only FM radio station I listen to is 88.7FM because that's the station that my iPod FM transmitter is set to. If I want to capture some online radio station, there is a ton of software to do it and recompress it to a memory stick.

What I really want to see would be something USB-key sized that supports Bluetooth and some sort of streaming protocol (even WMV!), along with Bluetooth dial-up networking modem support. I'm sure it wouldn't be crazy expensive. Battery life would be a problem, I guess, but if it was USB-based, it could get power off of the PC (or a power adapter of some sort).

The idea is for me to be able to access online streams through my cell phone (EDGE/GPRS-enabled). There's a ton of web stations I WOULD listen to, but just can't. Unlimited EDGE/GRPS means I can stay connected for as long as I want (short of battery life, but I keep my chargers handy in the car anyway). If it was really well designed, maybe it could even grab podcasts as they happen, or even do a text-to-speech on certain RSS feeds. TCP/IP isn't that complicated, and their are the requests for these basic Web 2.0 protocols.

I'd think it could compete well with XM, especially considering I get 200kbps EDGE connections in almost every city I spend time in. With a 20kbps stream, we could get near real-time radio with about 10 seconds of caching. I use Skype over my BE PDA and get really decent quality out of the connection to my BE cell phone. I was sort of hoping for a cell phone that would handle streaming, but every phone I get falls short of providing enough horsepower.

So basically we're looking at a USB-dongle sized device that supports BT dial-up networking, a simple TCP/IP stack, and a streaming protocol or various ones. It needs to have enough memory to cache a stream (maybe 64MB, but even that sounds like too much). It should have a headphone jack for sound output. It should be programmable through the USB port (dial-up settings, etc).

Thoughts?

Why?

[Mullen]

I understand it is a cool little device but what is the point? FM Radio sucks!

If you want good content there only a few ways this gets delivered; iPod (or like device), Satellite Radio (Sirius for me) or streaming music off the Internet.

FM Radio just sucks. In fact, I am dreading the next couple of weeks as my Satellite Radio is out for service and I have to listen to regular radio. It's going to be a long two or three weeks...