TiVo For Radio? 327
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.)
Size... (Score:3, Interesting)
And if it could recieve on multiple freequencies at once (at least two), would be ideal.
-DVK
My radio TiVo thinks I'm gay... (Score:2, Interesting)
about time (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had my replaytv for almost 3 years and I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to instant-replay rewind the radio to hear something again. I doubt this'll be useful for prerecording shows (due to car battery drain of running all the time) but the live radio pause/rewind/ff features are mandatory. Plus, with only those features, there won't need to be a monthly fee, like Tivo Basic [tivo.com].
Radio Tivo? Real World. (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny, but I can pretty much do that now with my mp3 collection (however it may have been acquired, that's not the issue here).
Interesting to note, there has been a trend on college campuses (campii? ^_^) where instead of watching TV, we hit the local (blocked to the outside world) filesharing app where we can get ahold of prety much any episode of any show we'd want to see. No ads, no Tivo, just an intranet.
Now, in the "real world," where bandwidth is actually a limited resource, people limit their p2p activities mostly to music. I think the only reason Tivo survives is simply the fact that it isn't yet trivial to download television shows like it is for mp3s.
skipping radio ads would be great (Score:2, Interesting)
I almost never listen to the radio. I might if I could essentially tivo it.
That's why the networks hate it (Score:3, Interesting)
That is precisely why the networks hate Tivo (aside from the whole 'no ads' thing). They also lose their branding. It's no longer "The Simpsons on Fox", it's just "The Simpsons". Networks thrive in part by being recognized by their viewers and associated with certain shows and genres.
What I'd use with Radio TiVo for (Score:3, Interesting)
I rarely listen to radio at home anymore -- my home theater system gets crappy reception. It's primarily my car. So I'd love for it to start recording a half-hour (or hour) before I get in the car:
1) Let me hear the weather and traffic that's inevitably broadcast just before I start driving
2) Scroll through the music, and skip over the commercials (until I catch up *snif*)
3) Hit a button to spool the current song off to the SD/memstik in [your favorite encoding here] for portable players.
At FM radio quality, I can't imagine anyone is overly concerned about piracy. In an ideal world, it would carry ID tags so I know what the artist and album are -- perhaps build me a shopping list while it's at it, or carry an iTunes URL so I can buy the full-strength version when I get home.
This shouldn't even be too hard to do: I think there's at least one Sony Clio model that has an FM receiver -- can you get at the streams? Hmm.. PalmOS doesn't multitask well, that might not be good enuf.
One way it would be useful... (Score:3, Interesting)
Other than that, I agree that there isn't much reason to have this. Why would you need to pause/rewind/timeshift radio? It is 75% commercials, 24% crap anyway. And there doesn't exist a radio talkshow host (aka shock jock) who says much worth listening to, let alone recording. I thought about getting a cheap FM tuner card for my Linux box. You can get one for about $15. I could then set up a cron to record......
That was my problem, I couldn't think of anything to record. Although I catch Stern every once in a while, he hasn't said anything new for 10 years. And all the other idiot Stern imitators with their overdone radio voices and sound effects just make me ill. NPR has a great website where I can listen to anything I might miss. Sometimes a classic rock station might play an entire album by an artist, but I probably already have it.
So I passed on the easy and cheap Linux solution, I would see absolutely no reason to buy a more expensive commercial product.
Cheap FM Receivers for PCs (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, the software that came with the D-Link was egregiously lame, and the $5 audio card in my PC made pretty lame audio recordings, so I gaveup on it :-) But that was DLink's lameness back then; presumably other products are smarter by now. I've heard that there's decent Linux software for the things, so maybe I'll try it again. The two biggest problems with the radio software were that
- It could only schedule one recording event, and only only could handle one day's clock, not a week's, so I could set it up in the morning before heading out to catch the train for work if I wanted to, but I couldn't set it up the night before or the weekend before.
- It only recorded sounds in
.WAV format, after accumulating them in RAM (in .WAV format), so instead of saving the program directly as an MP3, it needed twice the capacity of a .WAV, which came to something like 600MB/hour. (They did include some free MP3 software, and to cut them some slack, this was back when there were patent questions about the MP3 formats that they could dodge by doing this.) Back then I didn't have that much spare disk space, having split my 6GB drive between Linux and Windows. Now it's different, so even if the software's lame, I've got spare disk space.
It was really designed to use the computer as a friendly user interface to control the radio and use the PC's speakers, which it could do all on the analog side of a sound card, rather than having to digitize it.Re:Skip back 8 seconds (Score:2, Interesting)
Missed the weather for today, where the cops had radar set-up, whatever, just rewind and listen again.
As far as a season pass feature and recording programs to skip commercials, I don't know if I'd be willing to manage this from my car, but it would be a neat add-on for an iPod.
features to make this a killer app (Score:1, Interesting)
2. delete all things below a certain sound level threshold (gets rid of 10% to 20% of talk radio airtime)
3. variable increase pitch/speed control
4. one button 30 second digital skip
5. export to flash card in mp3 or some patentless format (easily convertable of course).
I'd love to have something to 'tape' talk radio and let me compress the shows I like from 1 hour broadcast into
-10 to -15 minutes for pauses in spoken conservation
-20 minutes commercials and 'top of the hour news'
-5 minutes
------------
left with 30 - 35 minutes of stuff to listen to.
Re:What's the Point?? (Score:1, Interesting)
SKIPPING COMMERCIALS and REWINDING!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is not "Tivo for Radio" (Score:3, Interesting)
1. It would have to pull in radio stations from outside my listening area.
2. It would have to have some kind of schedule mechanism so I could select what I wanted to listen to and when I wanted it to record.
3. Radio would have to be much better than it is right now.
1 and 2 pretty much imply hooking the box up to a cable or satellite box. Radio reporting around here is pretty spotty, so I seldom find out about shows I'd be interested in. I'd also want a TiVo-like feature where you could search for programs I was interested in.
#3 is much harder to do anything about. I love radio -- prefer it to TV in many cases, actually -- but let's face it, most of the radio that's out there right now isn't worth listening to. There are exceptions -- Dr Demento, sports events, some of the stuff you find on public radio stations, a few talk shows, occasional locally produced "genre" programs where you can hear blues, rockabilly, local artists and other stuff you might not normally hear -- but just setting it to record KOMA-FM Your Good Time Station, which sounds just like all the other stations in the market? No thanks.
College radio stations! (Score:3, Interesting)
I have an old standalone FM receiver (non-amplifier) hooked up to the line-in of a computer. I tune it to a station and leave it there most of the time, then use a program to schedule a recording at a certain time of the day. Convert that to MP3, burn a CD once enough are collected, and life is good. I'd like to do this with multiple stations, though, not just a single station.
College radio is great because they play music that has escaped the Clear Channel suppression. They play a ton of different music. However, each DJ has their own format, and they change every few hours or so, so if you find a style of music that you like, you have to listen at an oddball time (such as Thursdays 1AM-3AM or something like that). A RadioTiVo would solve this problem!
Also, college radio hardly ever repeats a song, since there are so many minor bands striving to be heard. There's more music to play than there is airtime. So, if you hear a song that you like, that's probably your only chance to get it! A RadioTiVo would let you go back and selectively save the songs you like, even if you weren't recording in advance.
Radio is also much lower bandwidth than TV. It might be possible to record several stations at once! Imagine recording the entire dial, and then using some kind of matching algorithm to pick out individual songs. You could have a self-service "request" system this way: you just flag the songs you want, and then the service listens to all radio stations until the song eventually comes across. Then it saves it. That would be great.
I would imagine the RIAA will slap this thing down as soon as it is built, however....
Time shifting radio (Score:3, Interesting)
You see, there is a lot of very good content on radio nowadays, but generally you have to avoid the commercial stations. They tend to have the interesting stuff because they know that people want more than the spoon fed commercial junk.
Myself, I often listen to Triple J [abc.net.au] which is a government-owned national broadcaster in Australia. They have a lot of diverse programs usually aimed at under-25 audiences (but still have stuff for over 25s).
I'm living in Europe now, but I still wanted to listen to some JJJ shows, so I set up a Linux box in Sydney with a BT878 based FM card, a cheapie sound card, some scripts, and oggenc. Now I get regular recordings of various shows each day that I download and listen to. The bonus of a BT878 type card is that I can tune to any other local station as well.
And I can also live stream too, at much better bitrates than the stations' own 'online streaming' at some unlistenable bitrate.