I love TiVo for my TV, but I’ve said over and over again that I really want RadiVo, so I can tape “All Things Considered” or “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.”
Evidently, there now is such a product. (Scroll down a bit to find that bit.)
Whoo hoo!
Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy
The low tech approach is to use a HiFi VHS VCR which can record 6 hours of excellent quality audio on a VHS tape and has a timer built in. You just need to connect an FM tuner to its audio-in jacks and set it to record from line in.
Yes, except the great thing about TiVo is that you can watch any show you want in any order–I don’t have to know where it is on the “tape,” I can just select the program I want to watch. (In fact, I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t watch TV without TiVo.)
As I’ve discussed with Diane in the past, this isn’t exactly what I want… From my point of view, the only place where a TiVoRaDio would be useful is in the car – the only place where I (rarely) even listen to the radio. But when such an occasion arrises, I would love to be able to have all the TiVo-like abilities of pausing live radio, going back to the start of the song/show, and best of all, know what the heck the name of the currently playing song is!
Yes, I’m a TiVo addict too. Of course the other great thing about the TiVo is it knows when things are on and it finds them for you even if they change time or channel. But that requires program guide data which I don’t think is as easily available for radio. Certainly the article only talks about software that can record at all, not seek out things for you. It’s more like a digital tape recorder for radio. it gives you random access like TiVo but not the other features.
Say, come to think of it, the two NPR programs Diane mentioned (and I guess all NPR programs) are archived online anyway so you don’t need to worry about recording them yourself. You can just click to listen any time: http://www.npr.org/programs/
I built something like this out of a linux box a year or so ago. Why?
Well, when I started, streamed radio was new. Now, it’s just expensive to the radio station. I was working in Mississippi, but my ears wanted to be in Chicago. One program I could not do without was streamed, but the server was generally swamped: WFMT’s The Midnight Special (Folk music and farce; see http://www.midnightspecial.org), which is now no longer streamed.
Another was not streamed then, but is now; Chuck Schaden’s Those Were The Days (then on WNIB/WNIZ, now on WDCB.)
On the whole, I decided I’d rather trust my radio to record than my stations to stream. And I listened to enough radio on Saturdays to put a serious dent in my social life, and make the concept of merely recording to 8 hour VHS more inconvient than just missing the shows.
The biggest pain was that the AM section of the receiver card I used (an ADS Cadet radio ISA card) doesn’t receive anything but static; I’m not sure if I just need to be exceptionally clever in the antenna department, or if it is hopelessly swamped by being in the same case as a 1.2 GHz Athlon Thunderbird and associated hardware… So instead, I use two standalone AM radios, tuned to the two AM stations I record shows from (sacrificing the flexibility I have with the FM tuner card), and combine the outputs down to have one station on the left and another on the right channels (AM talk doesn’t qualify as Hi-Fi.) Use the right options in sox and aumix, and you get two stations on one stereo input. Just don’t do it with music.
I do this with linux as it would be a waste to use one of my Macs for something so non-interactive as this.
Having the data in the car would be nice; I’m sure at some point there will be an iPod like car MP3 player that will synch itself to my home music server via some wireless technology every day or so, while sitting in the garage; in the meantime, you have to wonder why CD-R/W drives don’t come with a cartridge feeder that can just spit out a disk every so often, allowing the days audio take to be sitting there next to the breakfast table to take with us on our commute.
Say high to Darin for me; we worked together at ICOM Simulations in the early Mac days; glad to hear he’s back at Apple.
Dan, I’m just guessing here, but I think there is some sort of program guide for radio. Remember the little gadgets that came out a couple of years ago (one of them made by Sony!) that allows you to “bookmark” a song on the radio? All you have to do is push a button on the keychain device when you hear a song you like. Then, when you get home, you hook up this device to your computer and tell it what station you were listening to. Up would come the name of the song that was playing… Cool idea, but not very practical! Anyway, for this all to happen, there must be some kind of radio guide out there which a TiVoRaDio could use…
Actually, a plain-vanilla Tivo (or ReplayTV, anyhow, don’t know if Tivos have multiple inputs) could do this, if you had a radio with an IR remote and could convince the company to include your local radio stations in the program guide… it wouldn’t take any other hardware.
A cool stand-alone hardware solution that’s not quite a radio TiVo (but close) is the Radio Program Recorder (RPR) (www.radioprogramrecorder.com).
You can set it to automatically record any AM or FM talk show in your area. It has an AM/FM radio, a Sony digital recorder, and an FM transmitter (a wireless audio link to nearby FM radios) in a neat case that is smaller than a portable CD player.
The model RPR-X340 (5.6 hour capacity) has a USB link and software for uploading a recorded broadcast talk radio show from the recorder to your computer. You can also translate audio files from the computer to the recorder for listening on the go.
You can leave the RPR in your car while you’re at work and it will record your favorite talk show. When you get in the car to go home you can listen to the show through your car radio just as if it were on at that time. You can also remove the tiny recorder and put it in your pocket for listening while on a walk or jog.
Hi there,
I was just looking for any solutions for the ADS Cadet AM-fuzzy-crap problem, and I ran across this site. Thought you might like to hear that I actually just finished writing a “radio recorder” for Linux. It is written in PERL and uses rawrec (http://rawrec.sourceforge.net/) and oggenc (from the Ogg/Vorbis distro). I record in Ogg format, but it could be changed to anything else. I am temporarily using my REAL radio to record, since I am having the same issue as Bill is with the AM Radio. I have read some (including docs from ADS) that states it is an Antenna/noisy-power issue. This is the last issue I have to work out to make this thing a finished product. I may release the source someday (or today if you really want it).
Just thought you might be interested.
The answer to all your posts is REPLAY RADIO!!!!
This PC based program records anything streamed over the internet according to a schedule you provide, and then creates an MP3 file for use in an MP3 player, or automatically burns an Audio CD for use in any car or home CD Player.
It comes with a database of shows and stations, so you can just pick a show, and Replay Radio will record it when it’s broadcast over the web.
You can check out Replay Radio from http://www.replay-radio.com
Gary Burd has a detailed description on how to timeshift FM radio on linux
New product… an all-in-one solution
http://www.pogoproducts.com/
TIVO is the greatest invention… too bad I don’t have it!
I want one of these too.
I purchased a SmartCard FM Radio module for an iPaq thinking “how hard can this be” only to end up thinking it is kinda difficult and wondering why Tivo can’t help us out here.
What I want is my car radio to have a hard drive and a timer. I don’t care that it be as “smart” as Tivo, just as smart as a normal VCR. I also want a 6 second rewind button like the Tivo.
Everything else they can keep for later. But can I please have this now?
I’m scared of the Pogo product because of the bad reviews and buggy interface – but I’m tempted to buy it because it at least TRIES to do what I want.
Whatever your persuasion, if you’re a Savage listener, you’ve gotta have one!
I tried buying a stereo cassette recorder and tape recording shows. It was a total bust – if I wasn’t actively listening, the tape would run out, and I’d miss part of the show; the tapes were a hassle to rewind and listen to, and I kept on forgetting to actually tape the shows in the first place. This thing, just like the ads say, is like a VCR for your radio. Program it once, and then hit the play button when you’ve got time to listen. Tivo for the radio is more like it. 🙂 Super neat. Took only a few minutes to figure out how to set it up and get it working, and the next day, I had my show auto-recorded while I was out and about, and was able to download it to my PC in minutes and begin gathering the samples for this page.
Note: the included Digital Voice Editor software from Sony is easy to use, but for my purposes, the editing capabilities were just way too limited, so I went out on the net and found a WAV editor (it also converts WAV files to MP3s), called Aldo’s WAVEdit (version 1.2), from the Aldo’s Tools web site. It is free, simple, and does the job just fine.
What you need is a software package called Auto Recorder located here http://www.scott-inc.com/html/AR.htm which is the best thing I have found. It works like a radio VCR with timers and everything. I have it working as follows: Windows ME, PII 350 PC. I have an AM radio connected to the line in on the PC. I capture a 3.5 hour radio show every day.
It captures as a wave file. However, I have a batch file setup to use LAME to convert it to MP3 and another program that splits this file into 3 minute tracks. This makes it easier to jump over commercials on an MP3 player.