On pocketing streaming media November 15, 2006
Posted by The Jongleur in Technology.trackback
Ok guys and girls, make way for the Tivo (EDIT: albeit a “barebones” one) of radioland. For those of who are armed with broadband connections, this is probably the biggest killer application since the days of Napster. This site promises to help record streaming audio into …..well a mightily familiar file format that stripped threadbare the concept of portable music.
I am not going into specifics, but for all you Bollywood and A.R. Rehman afficionados caught in an alien land, a couple of radio channels and a little bit of hard drive space is all you need to complete the kit. Sub woofer speakers help- of course.
How is this related to Tivo? I clicked here thinking I would find software or hardware that would let me pause live radio, skip over ads automatically, and save my favorite radio programs to listen whenever I want. Instead I see just a utility for recording sound that is currently streaming out of your video card. Nothing about ad skipping or recording silently for later consumption, although I suppose you could manually do that. But… we’ve had this ability for a long time.
True, I guess it does not do everything that we now take for granted with a Tivo console- however it does one thing (remarkably well) and that is storing streaming audio.
I wasn’t aware that this technology has been around for a while, and now that I know, it surprises me that the music download folks are still in business. Picture this – Teen with a boadband connection + free Internet Radio + this piece of software. Certainly seems much more appealing than the tantalizing $0.99 a pop at iTunes, no?
Certainly
However, it’s still inconvenient for teens or anyone else to rip the tracks out of the stream, label them, and so forth. There are plenty of other less-than-legal ways to get music…
What I’m really interested in is something that could record a live program, like a talk show or sports newscast, over the internet, and let me listen at any time later. I have found several software packages that do this, but they are all non-free…