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When Internet Radios Get Affordable
DeviceGuru writes "Grace Digital Audio has just released a new device that functions like an Internet radio tuner in a whole-house audio system and is being sold at a surprisingly affordable price point. The Solo Wi-Fi Receiver works in tandem with Reciva's Internet radio station selection web service, provides excellent Pandora support, and also supports optional Internet services such as Live365, MP3tunes, Aupeo, and Sirius. It has built-in buttons and a display for easy control, comes with a dedicated IR-remote, and is supported by a free iPhone remote access/control app. We hear a lot about the high-end Sonos gear, but at just over $100, this little gadget seems like a breakthrough in cost-effective Internet radio, much as the Roku Netflix player broke ground in low-cost Internet video streaming."
When it gets affordable, I'll still be happy with analog.
Since the goal is cheap, what about the Chumby One?
Oh... I live in Canada, I can't have one.
boo.
Yup, the site acts slashdotted 8 minutes after this posted up...
I probably won't be buying one of these anytime soon, but that is only because of my extensive music & stereo collection combined with 7 Linux & windoze machines at home. At this price, they should start selling well, Maybe they'll be the new hot xmas gift this coming season.
How is a pricepoint different than a price. And how is 105.37 dollars a price point. Who says, "I'm looking for an internet radio, but I don't want to spend more than 106 bucks?"
You can always make your own
It works great, only $75
I'm not really seeing the market for this. So I want a device that plays internet radio, but don't want to just get an iPod dock, use a laptop/netbook and uses Wi-Fi so it isn't like your getting always available portable internet. If you have a home theater system, why wouldn't you just have a HTPC and just use VLC and connect to the internet radio that way, if you don't have a home theater system, why not just use an iPod or laptop?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
And on the other end(s) of the loudspeaker, is the idea of multicasting going anywhere? After radio more and more TV, eventually in HD, will be streamed and having a full 1-1 connection for every client seems terribly wasteful.
Is multicast tied too tighly to IPv6, already obsolete, can it be jury-rigged into IPv4 by the ISP and a smart enough router? I always feel bad when listening to a niche radio station for the bandwidth cost I incurr...
An Ipod Touch can receive Internet radio through various apps, and it can fulfill many other functions as well. Why bother buying these one-purpose devices that usually cost almost as much, if not more than an 8GB Ipod Touch? There are probably smartphones (including the iPhone) that can do it, as well.
Streaming sources like Pandora and Last.FM are free and legal. I don't have to search for music I like, and I don't have to worry about running out of storage space.
Older palm tops like my Nokia 770 work well too. I have an old P75 with Debian and Darwin Streaming Server installed, plays my mp3 collection non stop on a few different play lists, I use the Nokia as a radio while mowing the lawn.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Internet radio can't be cheap as long as unreasonable download caps exist, as are common, at least in Canada. Broadcast radio costs effectively nothing, leave the radio on 24/7 if you want. If you try that with your net connection you'll be paying for surplus usage long before the month end.
Internet radio? What if the internet goes down? Now software radio on the other hand can be useful in all sorts of situations whether you use the internet or not.
Yes, if you don't count any country besides the US, UK and Germany.
Dilbert RSS feed
What is the point?
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
The entire review is apparently predicated on the idea that you'll control the thing from an iPod Touch or iPhone.
If you have an iPod Touch or iPhone, what the hell do you need this thing for?
Tell us what it's like to actually use the device itself.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I've got to admit that I get a lot of use out of iHeart Radio.
I still won't pay for radio, though. I buy a lot of music that I hear on radio, so I figure it's a good enough promotional mechanism for music that it should be free. As far as "talk" radio, no thanks. I don't need any more voices in my head telling me what to think. I'm happy with the occasional podcast (some of which I'll subscribe to, such as Red Ice Radio from Sweden or Mysterious Universe from Australia).
The player or "internet radio" is a different matter though. I don't see why it should ever cost more than a regular radio plus a $10 wireless adapter. And I'll either plug it into my existing speakers or a pair of headphones. I guess I'm old fashioned but listening to radio via 3G feels wrong, like why should I take up bandwidth to hear music that I can get otherwise. I know it doesn't make sense because iPhone and iPad users don't seem to worry about it, but that's the kind of hairpin I am.
And, depending upon where I'm at, the "regular" radio is plenty good for me. Like if I'm near Monterrey, CA, there's a great station that plays Hawaiian music 24/7 and in New York there's a half-dozen stations that play great rock, jazz or classical music with minimal commercials. Things have been a little rougher here in Chicago ever since the public station WBEZ stopped playing jazz all night. Still, there's enough good stuff on there that I keep my car radio glued there just like the middle eastern cabdrivers. When I walk the dog, I take the mp3 player, which has an FM radio. Except for sports, AM radio is a total waste of the spectrum. Everybody is hollering about how Obama is black and doesn't have a birth certificate or how the mexicans are taking over, interspersed with commercials for erectile dysfunction (which leads me to believe that conservativism and E.D. go together somehow, though it seems they don't have any trouble getting it up for their 18 year-old rentboys).
One more thing that I like radio for is sports. For some reason, probably dating back to my childhood, I'd rather listen to a White Sox game on the radio than watch it on TV. With a good announcer (like Bob Elston when I was a kid and Ed Farmer now), my brain does a better job of creating the visuals than television cameras ever could. Oh, I also like the Bears and Blackhawks on WGN. The announcers are all homers, just like it should be. I don't listen to the Cubs, ever, because they suck dick and anyone who likes them sucks dick (you can look it up).
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hell yeah. Back in the day we used to crowd around the muted TV, watching the game while we listened to it on the radio.
I've a couple of DAB+ digital radios that also have WiFi/LAN connection options so I can tune in or play music from UPNP shares on my home network and network radio (and FM broadcast too but I've no need for that as the broadcast stations of interest to my ears all broadcast digitally now). I quite like these Linux-driven devices and think the convergence quite handy - clock radios that can play practically any audio content I'm interested in. I hardly ever use them as network radios but, should I have a sudden desire for some Romanian Gypsy Pop Fusion, I'll know where to turn ;-)
It's worth a bit more but worth it. The cumulative benefit of the system is great, considering you can add nodes easily once its in place and sync or not sync. Especially awesome when combined with MusicIP.
TFA looks like a troll. There are actually a lot of devices out there which meet the criteria.
If you're conscious about price and have lax wireless security get find a linksys wmls11b on line. For $30-40 it can't be beat!
This sig is alpha and shouldn't be viewed on production machines
I have to agree, I don't get the price. I picked up a used core2 duo Dell desktop with 2gb and 160gb for $130 last week. Could turn it into a htpc and have videos and Internet radio for only a few dollars more that just Internet radio. The people this is marketed to, the tech savvy, can find cheaper devices to do only Internet radio (old p3 laptop? They're under $100) or will spend a few dollars more and get a multifunctional device. At that price this is just a few years too late, it'd have to be under $40 before I'd even consider it
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Seriously.
As far as "talk" radio, no thanks. I don't need any more voices in my head telling me what to think.
I completely agree...which is why my radio at work is always set to C-SPAN Radio (I work in Rockville, MD, about 40 minutes from DC, so I can pick up the non-HD terrestrial signal). The portions where they have people call in during the early morning and late afternoon shows suck, but it doesn't get more unbiased then a direct audio feed from Congress and the Senate :-)
Living With a Nerd
I've had a freecom Internet Radio[1] for about 2 years now which cost about $100 (GBP 60).
Its a flexible unit with WLAN, Ethernet etc.
Andy
[1] http://www.freecom.com/product.asp?CatID=1148017
This is a veiled slashvertisement for Parallax Propellor.
In related news, each of my WiFi internet radios cost under $150.
We're almost there already.
Kriston
Original Xbox with Linux + XMBC
Kind of sad that original Xbox is more useful than any current console offering.
God bless open source.
Most people can pick one up for 20$ these days
The bonus is the ease of use, plug and play
I'm sure that Xbox looks totally sweet sitting there on your nightstand with its monitor. It's totally the exact same thing as the Squeezebox only way cheaper, without the monitor.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
SomaFM is offering its Groove Salad station in 128 kbps AAC.
And what is your point? The Touch can reproduce audio with a lot higher quality than a 128kbps stream offers... itunes by default now is 256k for music.
Really though, the question would be how well each device would do with audio output... I think either would be more than able to reproduce a 128k stream perfectly well, but as the original poster noted a Touch is more flexible.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Except for the ability to use YouTube on it.
Dude, it ships with a YouTube app!
Or play J2ME games on it.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
Wouldn't you rather play some of the literally 50k commercially produced games that are in fact written for the Touch??
I seriously cannot believe you are saying you'd rather buy a device that supports J2ME over a Touch for GAMES!!!
I'm just saying that my mobile phone does all of the above
Right, it "does" that in the same way a rock and a stream "does" laundry.
I use a Internet flat-rate with it that costs me 20 a month.
The Touch is even cheaper since it uses your home WiFi.
Since we are talking about a home solution for internet radio...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I got myself a ramsey fm transmitter from here and hooked up a cheap dedicated PC with my 3 terabyte music collection and I can hear my music from anywhere in the house or outside on cheap fm radios.
Sometimes people over think things.
The innards of the xbox can easily fit into a cheap home theater PC case. It also happily produces sound without a monitor.
I (and room mates) would never even be listening to internet radio without the xbox. It was just a natural fit since in Northern Ontario radio stations are pretty repetitive for ambience. Turned all of us onto music we would absolutely never be exposed to otherwise.
Most people have a few spare xbox's kicking around. I know I do, might as well hack the shit out of them and put them to work.
Jazz? On which station? There used to be one, but they dropped the Jazz format about a year ago. Unbelievably, they dropped it and became YET *ANOTHER* rock station... a real waste, because there are already about 20 of those on my radio! (I kid you not!) No jazz, anymore. None.
Internet "radio" certainly has its place, but with the hands of the Music MAFIAA reaching pretty deeply into so many pockets, it's not easy to make it FREE. Even Pandora cuts you off after a certain number of hours per month, now... DESPITE their annoying commercials. Terrestrial stations that are also streaming, shell out pretty big bux for those streams. Internet-only stations do, too, and have a bunch of draconian restrictions on how they can format their music! (No more than 4 songs by any one artist in a THREE HOUR time span, for example.) So much for 1'st Amendment Freedom?
Willie...
What am I missing here?
Ok, I run wifi via an Airport Extreme and Optimum Boost (30mbps down, $10 a month extra.)
I have four Airport Expresses with AirTunes and PandoraJam sending either "radio" (AirTunes) or Pandora to each Express, each hooked up to its own stereo/wireless speakers.
I can send different content to each Express, which I don't think a Roku/Grace device can do. So what's the advantage? Serious question, not being rhetorical....
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Or I can just set up my psp/droid phone/netbook to my sound system and stream 128k+ shoutcast stations for free
Streamtuner works for me. One does need a good internet connection of course, else the sound will be choppy on these things.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
83 dollars including shipping and also comes with a wireless access point.
http://www.amazon.com/RCA-RIR205-Infinite-Tabletop-Internet/dp/B0016OI1BY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1273383534&sr=8-1
They also sell an RCA branded one for the same price:
http://www.amazon.com/RCA-RIR205-Infinite-Tabletop-Internet/dp/B0016OI1BY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1273383900&sr=1-2
Most people have a few spare xbox's kicking around.
May I suggest a walk outside. The fresh air is lovely.
The innards of the xbox can easily fit into a cheap home theater PC case. It also happily produces sound without a monitor.
Having a home theater PC case on my nightstand would be even better. I stand corrected.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
NN
I bought a refurbished Revo Blik a few months back, and it's fantastic! The only problem is if I go to bed having queued up three or four files on BitTorrent it's impossible to listen to it as you fall asleep - you get five seconds of sound, ten seconds of silence repeated until the BT download finishes.
Analog will be soon banned/phased out. Because it represents the old mentality where you can listen to unmetered programming, and are free to make a recording with a tape deck. Where intellectual property is regarded as a temporary reward, an incentive to enhance creativity, and remove secrecy, but ultimately everything is meant to enter the public domain, as soon as further prolonging of property terms does not sufficiently enhance initial creativity, or release of private knowledge, private secrets into public domain. Recording radio programming with a tapedeck? Are you out of your mind? These days such violations of intellectual property laws, even the mere thought of copying any information, let alone it "eventually" entering public domain, have to be eradicated from the minds of people. These days we have to convert to a system where every time you start up the radio you click an accept button, that you agree that all content coming through it is owned by da man, for da man, and only for da man, and only by his grace and infinite kindness are you allowed to listen to any of this wonder and amazement for such a low low introductory monthly rate. Otherwise you're considered a heretic/pirate/thief, who probably just expects to get everything for free in life, and not have to pay for it. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Well, they say the best thing in life are free: sunshine, air, love, mothertongue, and it used to be the radio, you "payed for it" by being subjected to advertising, but now you'll get advertising + you have to pay for it in cold cash too. We can start with the radio first, while x-ing off all those things from the list of best things in life are free. Well, at least you have the option not to listen to the radio, like I do, or not to buy the radio programming decryption monthly card, the kind they sell for satellite tv programming. And life is still good. I can personally attest to that - I have not watched tv, nor have I turned on my car radio for 2 years now. Ok, here and there, but I don't miss it at all. When you have to start paying for the sunshine and air you consume, because it's owned by da man, it's gonna be very difficult to live happily without those things. Oh, by the way, since last February 2009, over a year now, I've been vegetarian, and doing just fine. Well, I did eat meat here and there, like pepperoni pizza, or company burger cookout, but I can go on fine without it, I don't miss it at all.
Oh and guess what.. I don't have much of a life, but I can say that I have been able to abstain from watching a single DVD movie so far. Ever since DVD's appeared on the scene. Because of the gargantuan copyright crap they instilled into it. I don't care what anyone else does, it's their business, but it's not for me. I've watched VHS tapes, quite a few, that my "bum" friend showed on his VCR, a few years ago, "unbum-like-ly" careful not to show a DVD, and parading gutted tapedecks from the 70's as DJ mixing rigs. I don't know what's right or wrong about intellectual property, I can't tell others what to do, but I can make a choice on what I do and don't do. And then everyone is free to live their life as they please, as long as they let me be the way I wanna be too. Oh, and, even though my father was an alcoholic, I've been able to abstain from alcohol, I drink a sip here and there, but have never got drunk. Have I said I don't have a life? How about trying to abstain from Windows or Apple, or any proprietary computer systems? It's extremely difficult, especially when the hardware you buy only has windows drivers provided, and the devices is lobotomized, and most of the functions are implemented in software. I still keep good old Windows 2000 around, but I realize its days are numbered too. I have a cellphone, but I don't enjoy it, because it's not hackable, I don't feel like it's mine. It's full of secrets. I open it, use it, done with it, put it away. Same with a car, use it, done with it, but don't get the intellectual joy of hotrodders out of it, like they used to back in the days, that tinkle, sparkle in the eye kind of joy. The only joy in the computer and computer like things comes where I'm free on it, in things like Linux/Freedos or assembler. But I know these days are numbered too, and there will be a point in time, where I'll simply open up a computer, get whatever needs to get done, done, and close it off. It will be no source of excitement. The fallback for now is hardcopy books. Like Newton had them. When paper books are banned, to save trees, or burned, like the inquisition used to burn forbidden texts, because they contained "unmanaged", "raw" text, and only Kindle-like devices are allowed, where how long you spend on each page is monitored by da man, to make sure you're not reading or thinking something illegal, that you do not exhibit any statistical criminal thought patterns, in the name of public safety and security, when that time comes, I guess I'll have to give up reading too. I don't know what the heck I'll do then, but I hope that will be after my time.
Another good reason to keep your Sony is that power consumption for a radio receiver is usually quite small. I just measured the absorption of my radio receiver: it absorbs a mere 0.5 W while keeping the volume high enough to fill the kitchen with music. The internet receiver described in the article if I am right absorbs 2 W while running, 1 in standby. To this you have to add the power needed for powering up your network router, so you probably have to burn about 10 W for listening to the radio. Can we label internet radio as a green technology ?!?
***May I suggest a walk outside. The fresh air is lovely.***
Maybe where you are. Where I am, the wind is howling and it is snowing. If you could give me an IP where I can pick up a stream of weather a bit warmer and without the wind, it would be appreciated.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
http://www.gracedigitalaudio.com/solo-wireless-radio-media-streamer-p-94.html
145 Table './gracedig_gracedigital/zen_gda2_whos_online' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
in:
[delete from zen_gda2_whos_online where time_last_click '1273407072']
Don't these incompetents know that you have to prepare for heavy traffic when you purchase a slashvertisement?
$100 is about two times too much for this; when you can get HD video for $99, paying $99 to stream internet radio seems retarded. You could buy a used PDA at a flea market or yard sale and do the same thing (Except you'd have access to a lot more streams) for the same amount or less.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
***When it gets affordable, I'll still be happy with analog***
1. If analog has the programming you want, it is almost certainly a superior way to get it. No synchronization delay. No glitches. I listen to a bunch of NPR programs most Saturday mornings. I can get them either via the Internet or Over The Air. I tried the Internet for a while. I found OTR to be much more reliable.
2. The failure/refusal of internet content providers to settle on a single open format for Internet Radio (or anything else) and to stick with a single http:/// get request format for their "transmission" is not only annoying, it makes acquiring programming a major annoyance. If your analog radio channels moved around and used occasionally varying encryption, you'd probably turn the analog radio off and leave it off.
3. I've played around with a lot of digital audio stuff at various times. The only thing that I occasionally actually use is streaming albums around the house from an Edna server ( http://edna.sourceforge.net/ ). Edna (a python script) runs fine as a background task on a VIA C3 system that doesn't even have enough computing power to run Google Earth. I expect it'd run on any 486 or higher CPU.
4. Podcasts would seem to be an attractive alternative to Internet Radio. Except the #$@(& content providers go out of their way to make acquiring podcasts difficult/impossible except through manual selection. And of course, they have managed to screw up RSS feed format beyond all possibility of reliable decoding.
In short -- Internet Radio and its cousins are so unreliable and unintentionally difficult to use, that it's hard to envision them replacing over the air for most people most of the time.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
By posting this, I'm undoing some much-needed moderation I already did on this thread, but nobody's said anything about it so I gotta do it.
Squeezebox RADIO. No, not a Squeezebox, a Squeezebox RADIO.
http://www.logitechsqueezebox.com/products/squeezebox-radio.html
Knobs. Buttons. A little display. Wired and wireless Ethernet. A powerful loudspeaker.
Quote: If only I could just hit the power switch, and then turn a knob to the "KGO" station... ? I'd be pretty likely to buy something like this.
And I did exactly that a couple months ago. Drove over to my local big box electronics retailer and drove home with a Logitech Squeezebox Radio (it was definitely hard to find in the store, though, since it straddles the world of boomboxes/radios and internet gear).
At $150 it's not really that cheap, but it does exactly what many people here are clamoring for: gives them SIMPLE one-button access to internet radio, without having to fire up a full-blown PC app. I bought it for my elderly father, and have a preset button (a hardware button) set to KCBS (San Francisco), WINS (New York), an internet station that plays Celtic tunes, and so forth. Two button presses (power + preset) and he's got the sound filling the room, and the PC can stay off.
And soon the battery module will be available for sale and he'll be able to carry the radio around, even.
This is a solved problem, folks. Go buy one for your elderly relative.
One simple rule for its versus it's
About 3 years ago, the UK Currys/Dixons in-house brand Logik came out with the IR100 (also Reciva based) at GBP79.99. Within a few months they were marked down to GBP39.99 - a significantly lower price point than the USD100+ for the Solo.
This post is either one of the most amazing parodies of Slashdot stereotypes ever put together, or very, very sad...
A price point is an economic term. It refers to a theoretical optimum on a price curve. The word for the actual price of something is (drum roll please) "price."
Yeah, I know, this sort of semantic nitpicking is obnoxious. But I can't help myself, because people keep giving me money when I do it. Hence the name of my website.
You know paper books are on the way to getting banned, when toilet paper culture is changed to bidet's, where water is considered a renewable resource but paper is not. As long as I can take comfort in taking a reassuring peak that there is a roll of toilet paper right next to me, as I'm reading, I don't have to worry about book paper in front of me being legally banned, even if that "book" is an LCD screen for now, and traditional, "antique" paper books are hard to come by.
Back in the day, I used to have a set of cron jobs that would record programs from NPR over an antenna. It worked very well. Things would get recorded as PCM, which would get encoded as VBR MP3 once the program had finished. I ran it on a K6-2 350, which was nowhere near fast enough to encode with my settings in real time, and would sometimes have 3 or 4 nice'd encoder processes running at once... Not that FreeBSD gave a shit about that. :)
It was absurdly reliable, and with NTP, the timing was eerily dead-on. Appropriately named and timestamped MP3s would land in appropriately named directories, and every now and then I'd just go through and either delete or archive them to CD-R. During all of this, the box was also doing everything from multilink PPP with a handful of 56k modems, to dealing with printers, to downloading porn from usenet, to...you get the picture.
The script first would set the record level on the sound card (just in case it'd changed for some reason). Then, it'd fire up brec (which has a FIFO buffer in RAM in case the disk is hogged up doing something else) to a raw PCM file (no need for WAV headers), LAME would encode it into an MP3 in the correct directory with the correct filename (formed using an appropriately-formatted date command), and the original file was then deleted. IIRC, I used mid-side encoding (like FM uses), and 44.1KHz with a ~16KHz lowpass filter to get rid of any aliasing or encoding of unwanted noise (FM doesn't go up higher than 15KHz).
I used an old Kenwood standalone digital tuner and a rooftop antenna as a source. It worked without any glitch at all for a couple of years, and it always sounded great. I used it until I moved to an apartment where I couldn't get radio reception, the BSD box died, and I lost interest.
I mention this because these days, I'm using podcasts a lot (especially in the car with my Droid), and find them to be very unreliable and of generally poor quality -- plus, a lot of stuff (All Things Considered) isn't available through official channels at all. You seem to be in about the same boat.
Kid-proof tablet..
Because apparently we're retarded.
Oh, wait, it's just you.
Why do you think that people need to turn on TVs or monitors to listen to streaming radio on an HTPC?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Microchip has an "Internet Radio" with an OLED display as a demo board: http://www.microchipdirect.com/ProductSearch.aspx?keywords=DM183033 It is completely hackable, the complete source is available.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it