TiVo For Radio?

An anonymous reader points out this Wired story that says "several electronics makers are releasing new products that promise to do for radio what the TiVo digital video recorder has done for television." (Products that might seem puny to serious time-shifting radio listeners, but cool to see them anyhow.)

Easy with PC

[-*MadMax666*-]

All you need is:
==>A tuner card (say wintv FM)
==>A program to tune it (say gnomeradio - www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/gnomeradio)
== >A command to record it (say "sox -V -t ossdsp -c 2 -r 48000 /dev/dsp -t wav -c 2 -r 48000 /home/madmax/AUDIO/pipe1 &
oggenc -Q -q 6.5 -a "BBC Radio 2" -t "History of Psychedlia Part 2" /home/madmax/AUDIO/pipe1 -o /home/madmax/AUDIO/history2.ogg")
==>A command to stop it (say "killall sox")
==>And finally, at (see "man at"), to make it happen when u want.

All you ever need is a nice bit of unix/linux

Re:Only useful if I can share...

[Sir Rhosys]

(why is Science Friday on at such an odd time?)

I am pretty sure you can listen to any Talk of the Nation, including their Science Friday shows, on their website. Here's a calendar of past shows: NPR: Talk of the Nation Calendar [npr.org].

Re:Time shifting radio?

[Kaimelar]

I can only imagine this would be useful for talk radio... I mean... what would be the point of using this for a top 40 station?

Talk radio would be a possible use, but I also see devices such as these would be good for NPR junkies like myself who love the specialty music programs such as Hearts of Space, Echoes, or Thistle and Shamrock. Just like TV programs, these aren't always aired at convenient times, and it would be nice to record them for later listening or to take to work the following day. Same is true of other specialty music programs, such as many rock stations' local band show.

Of course, I can already do that with the many radio stations that provide streams [publicradiofan.com], StreamRipper [sourceforge.net], and a cron job.

Re:What's the Point??

[jat850]

TechTV has a decent guide on bitrates... maybe this will help [techtv.com]. Hope that helps...

Similar product ($12 or $36) already available...

[Mipmap]

Before moving out of the lovely SF Bay area couple of years ago, I wanted to capture the local jazz station (KCSM) from my FM receiver to my PC.

I found a product called Total Recorder (www.highcriteria.com) - which has a scheduling feature (so I could capture the Jazz Oasis every evening at 7pm).

Besides recording anything that can be played on your computer, I also captured some Internet radio streams, such as www.live365.com, which were otherwise un-capturable. Nice to rip 11 hours of Internet radio to a CD and play it in the car.

BTW - Radio Shack sells an RCA to stereo plug convertor for converting left/right audio plugs to a single line in port on your PC.

Re:like what?

[trodemaster]

Us os X users already have the killer App for this. http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/ Audiohijack will record any application and has full support for timers. Now if they would just build a weblisting for kexp.org so I can grab my favorite shows.. Additionaly automating the sync to ipod should just take an applescript..

Re:Easy with PC

[nolife]

You don't even need a tuner card. Any $5 radio with a headphone jack can supply audio through the microphone (not really good) or line in jack (better quality) of any soundcard. I do this all the time with VOX software and my Uniden police scanner on Windows. Of course this method has none of the features of TIVO but much cheaper.

Re:RIAA vs. NPR

[Anonymous Coward]

because NPR is supported by your donations (well, mine, anyway) it's not stealing to record it and listen later

No no no no no no no

It is not illegal to tape *anything* on the radio and listen later, regardless of their business model.

Already done - Replay Radio.

[jelwell]

This is not the first time this type of application has been talked about on Slashdot.

Anyways, this software already exists for intenet streaming radio broadcasts:
http://www.replay-radio.com/ [replay-radio.com]

Joseph Elwell.

Re:Already done - Replay Radio.

[jelwell]

Here's the old slashdot article on this subject:

TiVo-Like Devices for Radio [slashdot.org]
Joseph Elwell.

Re:What's the Point??

[CoolQ]

And what's wrong with the audio files on their website?
http://cartalk.cars.com/Radio/Show/online [cars.com]
Sure, they're RealAudio, but that's not a problem *cough*mencoder [mplayerhq.hu]*cough*Audio Hijack [rogueamoeba.com]*cough*.

Re:What *has* tivo done for telelvision?

[Skater]

Like the other poster said, it's really an entirely new way to watch TV. You watch what you want, when you want it. Sunday afternoon, nothing good on? Watch those Seinfeld episodes you recorded last week!

I rarely watch any program as it's being broadcast now, and I'm getting to watch things I always want to but didn't want to deal with the VCR for (like Get Smart). It's easy to snag movies and stuff no matter when they air, because you don't have to worry about running out of tape.

I don't actually have a TIVO; mine's a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 provided (for a fee) by my cable company. It's nice because it's also my digital cable tuner, so everything is integrated and it doesn't need a phone line hooked to it. It works quite well.

--RJ

Re:Skip back 8 seconds

[Grendol]

Audio files of NPR shows are typically available at the NPR.org web site the following day. They even keep audio archives.

This has been a "solved problem" for many years

[The_Laughing_God]

I've been using an old Linksys USB FM radio to record certain shows for several years (This American Life, some radio documentaries, a few radio game shows like BBC's "My Word" and the American "Says You") Usually, I just wipe them later, but the occassional "keeper" gets MP3'd for archiving or sharing with a friend. Since strict audio quality is not an issue withthese shows, mono at voice quality suffices, and that's fairly minimal HDD space. The keepers in MP3 even tinier. If you really push it, you can get some shows onto a floppy though there's little need to, now that most people have MP3 players and laptops have CDs.

If they want to market this (with episode tracking like TiVo for TV), more power to them - but you can implement the rest of the scheme yourself for under $20. USB (or PCI) radio tuners are cheap.

Re:Cheap FM Receivers for PCs

[AIXman]

Yeah, the D-Link USB radio hardware works well, and you are right, the software that comes with it is definitely lame. They are out of production, but maybe you can still find them. I got mine from the Gateway online Computer Store (I had a free shipping coupon>

I enhanced my D-Link radio with freeware called Radiator from flesko.cz [flesko.cz]. It allows you to record to .wav files, and set a recording timer.

The Radiator software is excellent but it is for the Windows platform. I am running it now on Windows 2000. D-Link says the DSB-R100 is not compatible with Windows XP. I don't know if Radiator will make it work with XP.

I selected my computer radio because it was compatible with the Radiator program, I think that is a good critera for shopping for an integrated radio. I had been running it with an ISA Reveal FM Radio card, but my new Dell had no ISA slots, so I had to buy the D-Link.

TiVo does it already

[l-ascorbic]

...at least in the UK. I don't know about elsewhere. It can record any of the radio channels that are available through cable. This includes virtually all of the local and national stations, plus quite a few that are digital only.

I use it to record specialist shows from BBC Radio 1 [bbc.co.uk] that are broadcast at ungodly hours, such as the Breezeblock [bbc.co.uk] and Gilles Peterson [bbc.co.uk] and listen to them at a more civilised time.

Re:Time shifting radio? (www.RadioMyTime.com)

[Anonymous Coward]

www.RadioMyTime.com
www.RadioTime.com