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TiVo For Radio? 327

Posted by timothy from the annoying-ads dept.
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.)
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TiVo For Radio? More

TiVo For Radio?

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  • Time shifting radio? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Evil Adrian ( 253301 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:26PM (#5939099) Homepage
    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?

    • Re:Time shifting radio? (Score:4, Funny)

      by sakul ( 310891 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:28PM (#5939121) Homepage
      skipping commercials
    • i've been looking for a long time for this kind of thing. I can't listen to Jim Rome most days, and oftentimes, I can't get out of work early enough to listen to Michael Savage.

      I always wanted to set this up on one of my old macs.. so that I could listen on my mp3 CD player in my Jeep.

      I think this is a great idea. I hope that it will work with both AM as well as internet streams.

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

    • Re:Time shifting radio? (Score:5, Funny)

      by JonnyElvis42 ( 609632 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:43PM (#5939300)
      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?

      Wait, are you saying you have a radio station that plays 40 DIFFERENT songs??? Do you mean over a period of 5-10 years, or have you just not listened to the radio in the last decade?

    • 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

    • " I mean... what would be the point of using this for a top 40 station? "

      It beats buying CDs.
    • 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
    • There are some excellent radio stations out there that aren't top40. I would especially like to capture live internet streams of stations like KEXP (http://www.kexp.org).
    • 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? CBC Radio 1 (AM) in Canada plays shows from various international broadcasters overnight (1AM-5AM) I just wrote a script that automatically records each night's shows (in 1 hour blocks) so that I can play it back during the day.

      I guess that it kinda classifies as talk radio. They also play specific things at specific times... ranging from rare music (Heinkelman's 45's comes

    • ...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.

  • like what? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mrpuffypants ( 444598 ) <mrpuffypants@gm a i l . c om> on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:27PM (#5939104)
    the iTunes Music Store? listen to just what you want without to fuss of commericals?

    move along....

    • Re:like what? (Score:2, Informative)

      by trodemaster ( 672819 )
      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..

  • Size... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dvk ( 118711 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:27PM (#5939111) Homepage
    With the size of sound files compared to video, you can probably store LOTS of recorderd time Days, maybe?
    And if it could recieve on multiple freequencies at once (at least two), would be ideal.

    -DVK

  • Isn't that... (Score:2, Troll)

    by ajiva ( 156759 )
    Isn't that called a Tape Recorder???? Seriously, a Tape is much better for this, and most radios have tape players builtin ANYWAYS.
    • Yeah, I suppose it it.

      However, a Tivo for television is called a VCR....

    • Can a tape recorder be setup to automatically record a program from say 11am to 2pm Monday through Friday removing all advertisements with the ability to erase/write over the all ready recorded content not listen to in 3 days?

      A tape player is not better at doing this and if I am correct, CD players are standard in most new vehicles with tapes costing extra?

    • Re:Isn't that... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dvk ( 118711 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:43PM (#5939302) Homepage
      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
    • Well:

      Tape cassettes are maybe 90 minutes max, that's 45 minutes per side. Not much time compared to a radio show, especially a music show that might run 2 to 3 hours.

      I have YET to find a music-quality recorder with a built-in radio timer. Nothing compared to what TV viewers have had for years with a timed VCR. I actually know folks who record radio shows on their VCR, on the sound track (tune their cable box to the FM music station, set the timer, etc.)

      About a year ago, I really tried to find a "

    • Isn't that called a Tape Recorder???? Seriously, a Tape is much better for this, and most radios have tape players builtin ANYWAYS.

      Most of them don't have timers, and you can get at most 120 minutes of uninterrupted recording (and that's with one of those ultra-thin C-120 tapes in an auto-reverse deck). There are reduced-speed recorders with timers available, but it's not the kind of thing you'll find on the shelf at the average electronics store.

  • Radio Shows (Score:5, Insightful)

    by captainstupid ( 247628 ) <dmvNO@SPAMuakron.edu> on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:30PM (#5939144) Journal
    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.

  • Taping the Top 40 (Score:5, Funny)

    by sssmashy ( 612587 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:30PM (#5939150)

    "If you had a friend who was interviewed on a news program and you sent him a copy of it, I think there's a pretty strong chance that would be considered fair use. On the other hand, if you taped all the top singles off the top 40 stations and sent it to all your friends that is more likely to be illegal."

    Legality issues aside, I think that if I taped the "Top 40" and sent it to all my friends I'd find myself running out of friends very quickly...

  • If it even works close to this [wsj.com] I'll be sure to have a full selection of Ani DiFranco and Liberace at my fingertips!

  • Only useful if I can share... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Skyshadow ( 508 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:31PM (#5939154) Homepage
    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?)

  • Holy Cow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by terpia ( 28218 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:32PM (#5939167) Homepage
    So now I can listen to ClearChannel approved music *anytime* I want? Sweet!


    Actually, it is a nice idea. I can't wait to actually listen to music on the way to/from work instead of some insipid talk show.

    • Actually, it is a nice idea. I can't wait to actually listen to music on the way to/from work instead of some insipid talk show.

      That's why they invented the CD player.

      If you want more selection than that, there's a large array of MP3-playing systems for cars too, from CD-R players (which stores around 6-12 CDs worth of music), to MP3 jukeboxes which are basically hard drives connected to the stereo, which can store your whole collection.

      The only radio I ever listen to is NPR, and even that is pretty rar
      • That's why they invented the CD player.

        And 8-track, and casettes, but the CD/MD players gave everybody what they want... then they want more.

        The thing that really concerns me is that you'll get people paying more attention to their car radio than driving.

        If you want more selection than that, there's a large array of MP3-playing systems for cars too, from CD-R players (which stores around 6-12 CDs worth of music), to MP3 jukeboxes which are basically hard drives connected to the stereo, which can store
      • Heh.


        I have a Sony MP3/CD player in my car, but quite often, I like to hear some music that's "new to me" so to speak.

        • Yeah, I'd like to hear something new once in a while too, but you're certainly not going to find anything worth listening to on ClearChannel radio or the Top 40.

  • A new possibility for excuses (Score:5, Funny)

    by jolyonr ( 560227 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:32PM (#5939171) Homepage
    "Sorry I'm late to work - I had my radio time-shifted by two hours and I thought it was 7am when I woke up"
  • 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?

  • Easy with PC (Score:2, Informative)

    by -*MadMax666*- ( 613848 )
    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.

    A

    • Re:Easy with PC (Score:2, Informative)

      by nolife ( 233813 )
      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.
  • Why do you need this? Radio just plays the same 10 songs over and over anyways. If you miss a good song, just wait an hour or two, it'll be back on.
    • We have one station here that is so predictable that you can announce the next song in advance if you've been listening carefully for a couple of days. At least their play list doesn't repeat every hour. They're on a daily rotation.
      • I know what you mean. Every night at work, I stop in to one area that always has a radio on(they never change stations). And, every night, I hear the same songs while in that area. Talk about predictable.
  • time shifting is a pretty tricky thing. for the brain to understand. The idea is that you can make something seemless by matching where something started from where it finished. My belief is that the visual cortex can identify the similarity of two pictures a lot faster then the mind can pick this up with sound. without the visual matching users are going to have a hell of a time doing a 30 second skip and picking up where they left off.

    The thing also for me ( a personal preferance) is that all the shows I

  • about time (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AbdullahHaydar ( 147260 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:36PM (#5939213) Homepage
    It's about time they did this...

    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)

    by Schezar ( 249629 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:37PM (#5939229) Homepage Journal
    So I could listen to the music I wanted to hear when I wanted to hear it, without ads?

    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.


  • Who needs TIVO for the radio when just about any worthwile programming is easily available [npr.org] anytime without commercials, except for the occasional ad from the national ketchup council [prairiehome.org]?
  • In fact, skipping radio ads would be even better than skipping TV ads. It must be something about the medium.... while I see the occasional entertaining television ad, I've never heard an ad on the radio that didn't make me want to stick a sharpened pencil in my eye just to distract myself from how obnoxious the ad is.

    I almost never listen to the radio. I might if I could essentially tivo it.

  • ... for the same reason that I subscribed to eMusic for about 18 months. In this market, there is no decent music on the radio most hours of the day. I'd welcome the ability to easily time sift the few decent shows of the week to those hours when I'd like to have music on.

    I emphasize "easily," because, in theory, I could use a tape deck to time shift, but that would be much more trouble than it's worth.
  • The RIAA would of course attempt to outlaw this before it was released, but it is a good study in fair use. I don't have a tape player (haven't since I left home for college years ago), and plugging my radio into my line in port would be a great way to listen to public radio whenever I want to, instead of having to miss Car Talk every week. because NPR is supported by your donations (well, mine, anyway) it's not stealing to record it and listen later, and you won't be fast forwarding through the commercia

  • This is not "Tivo for Radio" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JoeD ( 12073 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:41PM (#5939286) Homepage
    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".
    • "With Tivo, I don't have to know what time or channel something comes on - I just say "Record all episodes of the Simpsons"

      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.
    • OK, I would be interested in something like this, but only if it met a few conditions:

      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
  • I have a PCI DAB radio card [modulartech.com], DABBAR [dabbar.co.uk] and EPGExplorer [dabbar.co.uk]. I pick off the stations I want to record from the 7 day EPG, and come back to a directory of MP3 files ready to play or move to my iPod, and there's no nasty FM noise, just nice clean digital audio.
  • webcast + streamripper + cron + shell script

    Records 4 or 5 shows for me every week. I'm never around for Says You or On The Media, but thanks to KUOW's shoutcast 96k stream and a couple lines of shell scripting, I can listen anytime or put it on a portable player to listen to while working out.

    Only trouble is, people look at you weird when you're grinning wryly while listening to Says You and using the elliptical trainer at the same time.

  • Skip back 8 seconds (Score:4, Insightful)

    by StormCrow ( 10254 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:44PM (#5939318) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Skip back 8 seconds (Score:2, Interesting)

      by djwiebe ( 664951 )
      Exactly, this is the application that I would pay extra to have integrated into my vehicle. Once you have a Tivo, it's amazing how much you take for granted that you can just rewind every input stream in life.

      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.

    • Re:Skip back 8 seconds (Score:2, Informative)

      by Grendol ( 583881 )
      Audio files of NPR shows are typically available at the NPR.org web site the following day. They even keep audio archives.

  • Schedules? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by yet another coward ( 510 )
    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 o
  • I've been doing something like this with Linux for a while now. I use a D-Link DSB-R100 [dlink.com] (unfortunately discontinued), sox, lame, and crontab. I used to burn the resulting MP3s on a CD-R and take them with me to work, but now I've got an iPod, so I use that instead.

    I originally used this setup to record NPR talk shows that I couldn't get on the radio while at work (because of lousy radio reception), but now I also use it to record a local radio station's [live105.com] electronic music show [live105.com] (which starts at 10pm on Satu

  • What I'd use with Radio TiVo for (Score:3, Interesting)

    by unfortunateson ( 527551 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:50PM (#5939392) Journal
    Side note -- just looked, and RadiVo [radivo.com] already is trademarked and has a website -- but no product. Eh. Slashdot 'em anyway.

    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.

  • Similar product ($12 or $36) already available... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mipmap ( 569611 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:51PM (#5939404)
    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.
  • This would be great. My wife and I try to listen to the Capitol Steps show whenever it's on (two or three times per year), and sometimes we miss it. A "set it and forget it" radio TiVo system like this would get use in our house, for this and for other scheduled radio shows.

    Heck, if it could be integrated with an iPod download mechanism... I think the number of geeks I know who would set up a cron job to download "Car Talk" into their iPods every week is probably significant.

  • Timeshifting MP3 radio stations works well because the MP3 stream software reads the title and artist off each track as it arrives and the MP3s get nicely parcelled up with sane information about each track. Makes it easy to quickly sort through the stuff you want to listen to and discard the rest.

    If FM radio time shifting is going to work, users are going to need to receive some sort of meta-data along with the tracks, talks and plays so that they can tell what has been received. For some programmes, bei

  • Actually, this would be great. I have a couple of shows that i love listening to, but cant get in my office. I can get ehm a day late off usenet, but thats kind of annoying.

  • One way it would be useful... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gosand ( 234100 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:55PM (#5939439)
    The only way I could see this being really useful is if you could set up a wishlist (song X, song Y, etc) and your RadioTivo would record it whenever it played. Or maybe if you could download the playlists from radio stations, you could select which songs you wanted to record, and the RadioTivo would do the rest.

    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)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @04:56PM (#5939445) Journal
    A few years ago I bought a USB-controlled radio for my PC for $29. (It was a D-link product, now apparently discontinued.) There have also been several FM Radio cards for PCs, and most of the current TV Tuner cards for PCs also do FM radio. Seems pretty silly to buy a $150 frob for radio when you can get TV as well for $75-100, or radio for $29.

    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.
  • XM radio ?
  • Hmmm, they may be on to something here. Maybe I could come up with an item that can time shift a single image from a point in time. And how about being able to use it anywhere. Think that would work?... Nah.
  • I already get most of my radio via the BBC's 'listen again' service (sometimes available on ogg, mostly on WMA and RM). I can listen when I want, pause, fast forward, rewind and everything else. All I need is broadband to my car (or an in-car MP3 player since I have a RM-MP3 converter) and it'll be perfect.

    For this reason I can't see a radio TiVo selling to well here, since all the decent ad-free radio (comedy for me but also classical music, serious discussion, various other public service stuff) is on th
  • Really, how many radio shows are there worth recording? NPR yes. Pacifica, yes. Everything else? why bother? AM talk is whenever I listen a bunch of uninformed people talking to other uninformed people. why record that?

    NPR you can just go to their site and listen to it again anytime.

    Pacifica ditto.

    yes I'm sure there are other programs that are of some use to someone but I don't know them all. now's your chance to point them out to me, not flame me.

    oh and besides all that, you can hook a vcr up to
  • It's pledge month at the local PBS radio affiliate.

  • This would have been amusing about a year or so ago when GTA3 came out for PC. In the game, you have radio stations you can listen to. You can also add your own music to the game by putting Mp3 files into the correct folder. Tell me it wouldn't be damn cool to have a collection of MP3s collected from the radio. "You're now listening to Art Bell.."

    (It's a double bonus for me. I live in Portland, and one of the cities in GTA3 is called Portland...)
  • I keep finding myself reaching for a non-existant button on my car radio that will jump back a few seconds so I can listen to that comment I just missed, or the DJ telling the name of the great song that just played ...

    I wish life came with a pause button ...

  • Already done - Replay Radio. (Score:5, Informative)

    by jelwell ( 2152 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @05:12PM (#5939604)
    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.
  • I cannot tell you how many times I have tuned to the news station to catch the tail end of a traffic report or something like that, and instinctively reached for the non-existent rewind control so I could hear the whole report without having to wait and listen for the next "Traffic on the ones" or whatever it was.

    TiVo takes over your brain like that, it's really insidious. :)

    With multiple tuners and a modest storage device, it should not be a problem to maintain a 15-minute FIFO for a dozen or so of your
  • TiVo for telephone!
    TiVo for slashdot!
    TiVo for mail!
    TiVo for church sermons!
    TiVo for bowling!
    TiVo for pinochle!
    TiVo for stargazing!
    TiVo for beer! It's not just for breakfast anymore!

    -
  • http://www.archos.com/lang=en//products/prw_500326 .html

  • This has been a "solved problem" for many years (Score:3, Informative)

    by The_Laughing_God ( 253693 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @05:58PM (#5940021)
    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.

  • College radio stations! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Krellan ( 107440 ) <krellan@NOspAm.krellan.com> on Monday May 12, 2003 @09:55PM (#5941627) Homepage Journal
    This would be wonderfully good for college radio stations.

    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)

    by riflemann ( 190895 ) <`riflemann' `at' `bb.cactii.net'> on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @06:28AM (#5943356)
    Actually this is a very good idea - please ignore 'crap top 40' trolls.

    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.

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