[STORK] A gadget wish
sdossick at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 16 11:01:35 PDT 2003
This is one of those ideas that lots of people have, yet for some reason no
one is productizing. My guess is they get scared of dealing with Clear
Channel and Infinity -- afraid of the large teams of lawyers that will come
along and squash them. Also, how much would you pay for such a device?
Probably the sweet spot for a car stereo device like this is $199 or $249,
which doesn't leave a lot of margin.
Here are a couple links to folks thinking along the same lines:
http://www.gotuit.com/audio/ is claiming to be making Personal Audio
Recorders (PARs) to time shift radio in your car. They've had no press
releases for a year and a half though.
http://gary.burd.info/content/articles/fmcapture.html details how this guy
set up his desktop linux machine to capture FM radio and store it as MP3s.
You could do something similar, even automate the burning of the mp3s to
CD's to play on a car mp3/cd player.
> From: Jeff Bone <jbone at deepfile.com>
> Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 11:00:49 -0500
> To: fork at xent.com
> Subject: [STORK] A gadget wish
> So as mentioned previously I've been listening to a lot of radio
> lately. And while the content's a lot better than I expected it to be
> after the radio wasteland of the late 90s, the medium itself aggravates
> the hell out of me; we HAVE the technology to make radio a reasonable
> medium, why the fsck don't we use it? Here's a few meandering thoughts
> on the gadget I want in my car / home to make this stuff workable...
> Points along the way:
> A buddy of mine has an Empeg. If you're not familiar with it, it's an
> MP3 player for your car. Yawn. But this one is a little Linux box w/
> a really nice domain-specific (and programmable) UI. It rocks,
> literally. Nice box, but that doesn't help radio does it?
> Then you've got the XM radio stuff. Fine, but I refuse to use it for
> various political-technical reasons. But sure, it's nice because
> you're getting a richer stream.
> Tivo: Tivo makes TV usable. No shit. It's the best gadget I've ever
> used. (I would say second, putting my TiBook first, but TiBook is
> something beyond mere gadget. Regardless, Tivo's the best "new
> category" device ever, IMHO.) Now where's Tivo for radio?
> Then you've got e.g. Phillips Streamium.
> Somewhere, lurking in all those ideas applied to different media, is a
> killer gadget.
> Basically, what I want in my car is a Tivo for radio. I want something
> that records and buffers the tuned stream, or maybe monitors and
> captures stuff using some sort of categorical filter on several
> channels in the background. I want a simple set of features:
> * tune radio broadcasts
> * BONUS: tune WiFi or wired streams if available
> * pause, rewind, etc. a "buffer" of what I'm listening to
> * record what I'm listening to
> * display the artist etc. metadata for current song
> * store and organize recorded songs on device (fair use!)
> * wirelessly access songs on box from elsewhere via 802.11foo (legal
> That's it!
> Is that so much to ask?
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