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.)

Time shifting radio?

[Evil Adrian]

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?

like what?

[mrpuffypants]

the iTunes Music Store? listen to just what you want without to fuss of commericals?

move along....

Radio Shows

[captainstupid]

I for one would be interested in this. There is a local public station that has a multitude of various radio shows featuring very different styles of music over the weekend. Often times, the shows that I want to hear are on very early or very late. For instance "Just Plain Folk" is on Saturday mornings between 7 and 9 am, while "DIY Radio" (punk rock) is on late Saturday evenings. It would be nice to schedule a "season pass" to these shows so that I could listen to them at my convenience. Granted, I'm certainly in the minority of radio listeners (most people only want to hear top 40), but I think that this product could have a nice niche market.

Only useful if I can share...

[Skyshadow]

I always listen to NPR on my way in to and from work because music just puts me into a sleepy funk when I'm commuting (slow traffic and all).

I can't tell you how many times I've heard something and thought "gee, my girlfriend would be interested in that". However, neither of us listen to the radio except in our cars, so unless we're carpooling (which we can only do about 1/3 of the time), the other'd still pretty much be screwed even with a TiVO-like recorder.

Now, if I could park next to her can and wirelessly transfer the show, that'd be completely different. Maybe I could flag reports for her and have them automatically transfer when the cars are nearby... Of course, you'd have to do some pretty impressive interface work with this in order to keep everyone on the road...

Also, it'd have to work when the car was off without draining my battery (why is Science Friday on at such an odd time?)

but not for internet radio...

[tedshultz]

It?s interesting to note that this is pretty much exactly what the RIAA was trying to stop internet radio from becoming. Who would have guessed that our old analog radios would have more sophisticated options than our internet radio?

Re:What's the Point??

[Skyshadow]

And the point of time-shifting radio is????

I almost never catch Car Talk on NPR on the weekends because it's on before I'm out driving around (I'm in CA, and I sleep in on weekends).

Now, OTOH, on the weekdays I find myself listening to crappy morning shows during my commute if I'm not up for news. I would really like the option of pulling up a show from the weekend (or a Science Friday or whatever) and listening to it rather than putting on Sarah & No-Name and listening to what happened on TV the night before just to have *something* to listen to.

Hell, I spend roughly as much time commuting as I do in front of the TV during the week. If you can see why TiVO has a market, surely you can see one here, too?

This is not "Tivo for Radio"

[JoeD]

This is the equivalent of "VCR for Radio", or a timer hooked up to a recorder. It's not integrated with a schedule.

People who have never used a Tivo might fail to see the distinction, but it's an important one. With Tivo, I don't have to know what time or channel something comes on - I just say "Record all episodes of the Simpsons" or "Record all movies directed by Stanley Kubrick", and it handles all the scheduling details for me.

These devices sound like you have to tell it to "at 10pm, tune to 101.3 and record for 30 minutes".

Re:Isn't that...

[dvk]

Let's review the differences:
Capacity:
Tape capacity: 60-90mins
Flash card capacity: 256Megs (256 mins at a very good quality mp3).
H/drive capacity: ~5Gig for a protable? (5000mins=83 hours)

Search/rewind/jump capabilities:
Tape: Rewind/FF. ANYONE who ever used a tape player would agree it's very s l o w.
Flash: instant
h/drive: very fast.

Ability for signal processing:
Tape: None
flash or drive: anything our circuits/processor allow. For example, commercial skip.

Size:
Tape: limited to pretty big factor by tape size
Flash: can be VERY small
h/drive: probably same size as tape player for now.

Other capabilities:
For example, ability to record several tracks at once, enabling recording of mmore than one frequency.
Tape: None
flash or drive: ability to write in parallel to multiple files.

Summary:
Tape has no benefits whatsoever (perhaps cost?)
over flash. H/drive is preferrable over flash if capacity is an issue and/or movement is not (i.e. for home as opposed to walkman-like functionality).

-DVK

Skip back 8 seconds

[StormCrow]

My biggest use of a TiVo-like feature for the radio would be to skip backward some amount of time to listen to snippets of a news/talk-radio show I was distracted from listening to the first time. I can't count the number of times that I've registered the tail end of an interesting story from NPR and wished I could go back to the beginning to listen to it again.

Schedules?

[yet another coward]

As others have mentioned, there is a use for this product for talk and feature programs. I enjoy Car Talk and This American Life, among others, but their timing does not fit my schedule. I would get the device, but only if it were very cheap and easy.

The problem appears to be the lack of radio program guides. Judging from the article, these devices are more akin to an old VCR than to TiVo. TiVo's scheduling service provides one of its draws. I can search for episodes of the Simpsons without knowing ahead of time the channel and time. Radio schedules are not so widely published, however. There is no Radio Guide counterpart to TV Guide, nor do these products appear to have guides similar to TiVo's. Unless/until they add powerful scheduling features, I predict that their niche will remain quite small.

Re:What's the Point??

[RobotRunAmok]

The Point would be Talk Radio. It's huge. In fact it's bigger than huge.

This guy [rushlimbaugh.com] already has people paying him for the privelege of listening to his show "24/7." He maintains a 2-week archive.

It's not about the music (is there anyone left who listens to radio for the music?), it's about the gab. This guy's [savagestupidity.com] already got one of these radio Tivo's, and has been promoting it's use on his website in his campaign against this guy. [homestead.com] And everybody seems to take their cues from this guy, [drudgereport.com] who now has his own nationwide radioshow too. I know as well that NPR audio archives are likewise very popular.

It's all huge, mostly absurd, and now available on-demand. Short term, it make take some money out of the pockets of the outfits that charged for access to their audio archives, but long-term it's gotta be a good thing for a genre that's just getting bigger (and more influential, rightly or wrongly) on a daily basis.

Re:Time shifting radio?

[ncc74656]

does anyone have an idea of how to do this now with a Mac OS X machine?

A few years ago, I was timeshifting Rush Limbaugh with a Linux box running RealEncoder in a cron job. If I were to do something similar today, I'd replace RealEncoder with something that would do live MP3 encoding. Assuming that Mac OS X has cron (a reasonable assumption), you should be able to do the same.

(These days, though, it's simpler to just sign up for Rush 24/7 [rushlimbaugh.com].)

Scheduled Music Programs

[billstewart]

Sure, most top 40 stations play the same music over and over, so recorded is no better than live, but there *are* still other music formats in spite of Clear Channel's attempt at World Domination.

• The Greatful Dead Hour - David Gans's weekly program. Here in the San Francisco area, we actually get his 2-hour KPFA live version. It's on Wednesday nights, at the same time as our weekly going-out-to-dinner group.
• Many Classical Stations play different types of music at different times.
• Many Jazz Stations also play different types of music - and sometimes they're the same stations that also do classical.
• Ethnic Programming on Mixed-content stations - Here in California there's a lot of Spanish-only radio, but there are also stations here and in New Jersey that play different ethnic music or news programs at different times of day, so you may want to record the Mandarin version that plays while you're at work, or the Russian folk music, or whatever.
• Listener-Sponsored Radio - No, not NPR, Brought to you by a Grant from ExxonMobil and Archer Daniels Midland - But real Pacifica Lefty Radio, which plays lots of different types of music, such as Latin and America's Back 40 (old-timey/folk/country/Bluegrass) and different types of hip-hop and random weird stuff, as well as doing talk programs.
• Prairie Home Companion on NPR. Brought to you from Lake Wobegone by Powdermilk Biscuits and the FearMonger's Shoppe, and also whichever commercial sponsor they've got these days.

Re:SKIPPING COMMERCIALS and REWINDING!!!

[Cromac]

What was that? I missed it. Oh I can replay it thankgoodness. (also pause while answering phone etc.)

The rest of us on the road are so sorry you've missed the latest tune while gabbing on the phone or whatever 'etc' may be while driving while in the car instead of paying attention to the road.

Most drivers seem to have enough problems with driving as it is without giving them another set of buttons on the radio to fool around with.

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

[smart.id]

Because the guy is running Windows. On Windows it's not as easy as "find a copy of lame" and "crontab whatever recording schedule you want".