TiVo-Like Devices for Radio?

crank asks: "I've recently hoisted an antenna high upon my roof, since I'm bored with listening to the mega-watt corporate radio stations and instead and enjoying great, niche college and NPR stations. What I need is some sort of TiVo-like radio device, which will tune to the appropriate radio station and record to the hard drive (ideally to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis formats). Then, I could dump these to one of the many portable devices or stream from a computer for later listening. This is especially important with stations that change format frequently throughout the day, such as KFJC. Any suggestions? I think the tricky part would be integration of the FM tuner. I've had limited success with leaving the radio station pre-tuned to the station I want to tape, but I'd like something smarter that would power up, capture the program, and then power down."

I know what this is for

Trying to rig the million dollar give-aways, I see :). Good luck.

radio

Wouldn't it just be easier to tune into webcasts?

Start with a recorder.

About a year ago, I did a search for digital recorders. I was unable to find anything suitable. For example, most did not have a Pause button.

TV-Tuner board, D-Link USB tuner

I don't know of any tools for it, but I have some ideas on putting yourself one together.

There are numerous devices that can get you a tuner on your computer. Many Hauppauge TV-Tuner boards work quite well, and as they are the BT878 chip, run well under linux. D-Link sells a USB-based tuner.

With that and some perl and encoder software, you should be able to slap something together. Cron could be helpful.

Shouldn't be hard...

Use command line tools if possible. Something that records to WAV would work, you could call it from AT. Then call your mp3 ripper to translate it, then delete the file. I'd use a digital stereo reciever (Radio Snatch Optimus) so I didn't get any drift in the FM tuner, plug it into the Line In port on your sound card.

use a vcr

--just use a vcr, it will record audio only just fine, have timers, and can do up to 8 hours worth on EP, then dump it at your leisure to your computer using whatever compression you want and audio in jack.

alternatively, there are several radios with built in cassette decks that will record on a timer basis. I just hit google on it, tons of hits, several brands and models.

ultra engineering geek, get a programmable thermostat and mod and hack away.

never owned a tivo, but won't it work on an audio input? or does it require secret hidden signals to work? No idea on that really.

Have you tried NPR.org

They have real player streams. We should press NPR to provide divx as well... Know your programs, go ahead and dowload/listen to them.

When I Lived in the UK I Wanted To Timeshift

BBC radio 1 is a pop station by day and a cutting edge music station by night.... when I lived in the UK I timwshifted by just recording big mp3s - I didn't even have an FM card, I just plugged my radio headphone jack into my PC.

Of course... now I've moved to the US which means I don't need to bother with the timeshifting by virtue of geographic location ;-)

But on the down side I only have access to lousy real audio - especially since the bbc is lacking manpower to do this in ogg ;-)

How bout a winamp plugin?

I listen to Internet radio stations all the time using xmms. A lot of college stations are available at shoutcast.com. It doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to write some sort of plugin for winamp that could do the job.

If the winamp plugin system won't do, how about heading over to the xmms dev mailing list and asking a few questions there.

This already exists...

It's called streamripper and you can find it here [sourceforge.net].

It runs on win9x, *nix, and OS X. I found it yesterday after reading an article on sfgate.com.

I've been using is since yesterday - works great!

Re:How bout a winamp plugin?

There's also ShoutGrab for recording MP3 streams:

http://ostermiller.org/shoutgrab/

NPR broadcasts in MP3

I've long since set up a system so that my home system time shifts All Things Considered to when I can listen to it at night. Since I've been busy during weekends, I've been recently doing the same with much of the weekend line up on NPR.

The nice thing is that, for NPR at least and most college stations - the ones you say you're interested in, it's easy - they all broadcast MP3 streams which can be nabbed with a simple mpg123 -s url >file.mp3 &, and then sleep 3720; killall mpg123. At that point, you're a simple cronjob away from being done (I start one minute early, end one minute late).

One amusing sidenote - I moved cross country this year, and I now live in an area with a lousy NPR station. I now listen to WUNC in North Carolina, a few thousand miles away, and gave to them during pledge drive. Hell, they played Heather Alexander on thier local music show. Anybody who plays filk is ok in my book.

--
Evan

Done and done.

Look here [afterdawn.com] for the Streambox VCR program. It's great for both video and audio feeds. Of course, you'll note the disclaimer that it's illegal to use in the United States. *shrug*

Cybercorder

Get a shareware windows program called Cybercorder. It records from your sound card in realtime in any format you want. Mp3, ogg, whatever codecs you have installed. It has a great timer system and way of keeping track of lists. Well worth paying for unless you want to spend a weekend dicking around with cron scripts and sketchy software.

FM Radio cards

None of the responses yet seem to have noticed the "antenna" part of your post. Anyway, there is ample support for FM radio cards in linux. Check out drivers/media/radio/* in the linux kernel tree. A number of the TV tuner cards can also tune in to FM. Now then, let's see.

Here is a list of radio tuner apps for linux [ibiblio.org] and here's another [google.com]. Also try googling for "linux FM radio tuner card". These apps, along with a sound card (depending on what kind of FM tuner you get) and oggenc/lame and a little scripting (hint: cron job), and you should be in business.

-- Bob

dlink dsb-r100 usb device is all you need

The linux driver is dsbr100.c. It's already installed with my copy of readhat.

Use fmio to tune the device, sox to grab the stream, lame to encode it and cron to orchestrate the whole thing.

I've done this.

I used to have a large rooftop antenna before I moved into this tin box/apartment, and had my own RadioTiVo.

It wasn't at all difficult, though I did spend way too much time optimizing the commandline for LAME and setting levels correctly. I just put a YMF724-based sound card into my headless, does-everything FreeBSD box, plugged it into a 1980s-vintage standalone Kenwood digital tuner (find something similar at a pawnshop or Ebay), and made some cron jobs to run things. The 724 was nice because its ADC stage generally sounded very good, and it had a loopback mode that it could be massaged into which would let you hear immediately if you had clipped the input.

The box, a K6-2 350, isn't quite fast enough to do VBR MP3 encoding in realtime, and I was dead-set on VBR. So, I had it record the entire program as standard 44.1KHz 16-bit PCM, and then run a nice'd encode process on the file after the radio program had finished.

Sometimes, usually on the weekends, this meant that 2 or 3 processes of LAME were running at a time trying to catch up. Not that FreeBSD ever broke a sweat...

It ran extremely reliably, and with an NTP-synced clock, the start- and stop-times were consistantly dead on.

Every few months, I'd burn a CD or two of Car Talk for archiving and nuke whatever was left over.

Of course, there was no way to change stations. I considered briefly the notion of building a machine from mindstorms that would push the radio's preset buttons, but then I realized that nothing but NPR had any programming which I actually wanted to listen to. :) Using an FM tuner card was always out of the question for reasons of noise and interference.

Hint: Use lame's lowpass filter to cut everything above 15KHz. There's nothing there but noise with commercial FM broadcasts, which are already band-limited to 15KHz anyway per FCC rules. That said, resist the temptation to use a 32KHz sampling rate and stick with 44.1. It's what the Nyquist filters and samplerate converters in consumer gear are optimized to work with, and makes burning audio CDs easier. These translate to better sound, overall.

Good luck.

How many stations?

How many different stations do you want to record?

I've been thinking about doing something similar, but I only have 2 stations I want to record off of, which is convenient since my soundcard has 2 inputs. My plan is to get 2 cheap radios with line out and tune each to one of the stations, hook each to one of my line ins, and set up cron jobs to record the shows I want. Seems pretty simple to me.

If I really wanted the radios to be powered down when I'm not recording I could hook theirpower up to relays also controlled by the cron jobs.

I'm sure there are more elegant solutions, but I don't really care that much since this whole assembly will just be stuffed in a closet with my server.

Yer all thinkin the wrong way

I just hadda point this out cuz its way different from what everyone is thinkin.alls you need is a nice stereo to record from thats digital and works with a remote and get a programmable remote with timer functions. I have a remote from all for one and its got an backlit LCD display and i can set it to press any button at anytime on anyday. Like say i wanted the tv to turn on at 6am, turn on the vcr, change to channel 32, record for 30 mins, shut off, and change the tv over to video2, thats no problem, and its damn easy and intuitive to setup and use.

Know your schedule

The real power of Tivo is knowing what is on and when. There's all kinds of ways to do the actual recording, from a receiver card to a tape deck on a triac, but it's all worthless unless it's recording what you want to hear.

DAB radios

Not that this helps you at all in the land of 'we don't use the technology everyone else in the world uses' but the Psion WaveFinder http://www.wavefinder.co.uk/intro.asp can be used in conjunction with http://www.dabbar.co.uk/dabbar.htm and DigiGuide http://www.digiguide.com/ to set up and record programs to MP2 or MP3 files.

DigiGuide is a pay service (something like 5 pounds a year for all TV and radio listing) - you don't need this if you want to set up the time and channel to record manually, but with DigiGuide (and a free 3rd party add on the details of which I forget) you can click on the listings and it will add them to the recording.

Unfortunately the main downsides are that WaveFinders are now only available 2nd hand (e.g. on eBay) and that the software for them only works on Windows (works best on 98) and they are somewhat flakey. There are now new DAB cards for about 100 pounds which are hopefully better behaved, but I don't know what software there is for them.

Nonetheless I am hopeful that fairly soon this will all work properly.

Did this for AM broadcasts

There are some talk radio shows broadcast on AM that I'd like to listen to. However, they're broadcast during the day, and I can't listen to them while I'm at work, so I was in a similar situation.

Unfortunately, none of the PC tuner cards have AM tuners on them, only FM. Makes sense, since my computer equipment seems to generate a lot of interference on the AM frequencies. So, what I ended up doing was buying a GE SuperRadio III and a long headphone extension cord so that I could keep the radio in a separate room and minimize the interference.

Since I'm only running Win2K at the moment, I bought Total Recorder [highcriteria.com] for US$12, which lets me make timed recordings in just about any format. (Unfortunately, no VBR for MP3, though, so I record to WAV and then convert using LAME.)

Using the "--present mw-us" flag with LAME, I can compress a three hour show down to 51.5 MB. A full week of both my favorite shows fits nicely on a CD for archiving or sharing.

Get a shortwave radio

SW radios like the Sony ICF-SW1000T can be programmed to tune a specific frequency at a specific time, and record to cassette tapes, much like a VCR. It should not be too hard to substitute an MP3 recording program in place of the cassette recorder.
SW users have been doing this for years, they are the people you should be consulting.

I have been wishing for the same..

I have DishNetwork. I can record programs on my PVR (PVR501) and it works fairly well. It is not as sophisticated at Tivo, but works quite well. My favorite features are live pausing and rewind, plus recording of programs. Imagine if Sirius or XM gave that capability to their systems? They already are sending a digital signal, much like the Satellite Broadcast Systems, so it could just be an additional hard drive away. You would need a little 5 GB hard drive, record it to MP3 or some other compressed format and organize it. It would be great!

Check their Website

My local (and favorite) College Radio station [wmse.org] actually keeps an archive of all their shows for the past two weeks on their web site. I dont know if yours does this, but its really great. If i miss a show i often download it and stick it on a cd tolisten to it during the blues drive or some other show that i'm less than enthusiastic about. Another bonus is that you can back it up and catch the name of the artists from the DJ.

I have this working with Replay TV

I have a sony digital fm receiver that takes direct tuning commands from a universal remote that you can program with timer options.

I set the universal remote (AllInOne Producer)to tune the receiver to 104.1 to record a talk show at 10:00 AM. The remote sends powering-1-0-4-1 to the receiver at 10am.

It sends a simple power off command at 3:00 pm.

I have my ReplayTV set up to record channel 813 (on of the Music Choice Channels on DTV) for the same interval.

The replay records the video signal from the DTV tuner (a screen-saver) and the audio signal from the tape outs of the receiver.

I use a scheduled task in DVarchive to unload it from the ReplayTV unit to my pc via my home network, and listen to it on my pc using the real player.

I use Total Recorder and MP3 Splitter

Total Recorder for Windows is excellent and inexpensive software to do this. I have an old Sony FM tuner/amp connected to the line-in on my Sound Blaster Live. Total Recorder does scheduled recordings straight to MP3 from the line in. It does this with the line-in muted so I can listen to MP3's, play games, whatever while it's recording radio from the line-in. I wrote a small app to rename the MP3 files from my own radio show listings file. I record at 64K so one hour of radio is about 28 meg. I use MP3Splitter to split the one hour MP3 file into 30 pieces of two minutes each. I edit out commercials and/or NPR newsbreaks and then copy to my MP3 player or burn on to audio CD. The splitting is a big convenience since most MP3/CD players were made to play 3 minute pop songs, not hour long radio shows.

Total Recorder is available from http://HighCriteria.com [highcriteria.com] is $12 for the basic version and $35 for the advanced version. I use the basic version. The advanced version now has better automatic file naming, stream recording, etc.

MP3Splitter is from http://www.codevisions.de [codevisions.de]. It's lacking in command line options, but I use the defaults and the shell extension "Quick Splitter" from the right click in Win Explorer to minimize input. Their download seems to be down right now. Try left menu "Downloads" then choose mirrors. Here is a working download link:
http://hj.dusnet.de/codevisions/mp3splitter.zip [dusnet.de]

Try VCRadio

VCRadio [sagebrush.com]

It is a non-free solution, but supports most of the radio pci/isa cards and external radio tuners.

I am not affiliated with this company, but I was doing research on this and found this to be one of the better solutions. I hope it works for your needs.

FM and AM plus Software to do what you want.

In my previous post, I mention VCRadio [sagebrush.com] which is the windows software that costs $18 and will record anything you tell it to at any time. Also, for getting FM and AM stations on your computer, try Radio-Man which plugs into your RS-232 (serial) port. Radio-Man costs $15 and can be found at www.pimfg.com [pimfg.com], go to Search Desc. on the lower left margin and type in "radio".

Radio TiVO for Windows

Radiator [flesko.cz] is an excellent freeware FM radio application. Auto-tuning and timer recording are available.

Dr. Matt...

Digital Radio

In the UK, you can link together a WaveFinder with DigiGuide, DABDig and WinDAB to automate the recording of digital radio transmissions.

CC Radio VersaCorder

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the CC Radio VersaCorder. It's not digital, but it does record FM and AM shows. You tell it the time and it records at 1/4 speed, so you can record those 3 or 4 hours shows on one side. And if you want to listen to it on the go, you use the player which plays the 1/4 speed tapes. It is not digital and it doesn't have a built-in tuner, but hook it up to a radio, or any other device, like a phone to record conversations. C. Crane makes many different products for radios so you might want to take a look at their . [ccrane.com]

I'm doing it now, but it's a pain in the (#(*$&

I've been doing this for quite some time now with my Hauppage TV/FM tuner card, but you have to schedule so many events for each show that it becomes a real pain:

-- First you have to schedule an event to kill any radio processes currently running.
-- Then you have to schedule a process to start the tuner on the station you need.
-- Then you have to start recording. I've yet to find a utility which will record at a specified time with no user interaction which is both free and runs on Windows. The "Absolute MP3 Player" is the closest thing I've found requiring you to only click a button. But you have to add your schedule to it too! And you don't get to tell it where to put the MP3's.
-- Then you have to stop recording.
-- Then kill the tuner app.

Worst of all, you have to listen to what's being recorded. There may be a solution for Linux, but unless you're ready to move your tuner card off your Windows box, there isn't a solution for Windows that works very well.

If you plan to change the schedule often, then my advice would be to forget about it, or start developing your own.

I submitted this exact same question several months ago but was rejected :(

TiVos do not just record.

Many of the posters have, I think, misinterpreted what a TiVo is. A TiVo -is- a glorified VCR, but that's not why it has captured geek hearts and minds (mine included). The key is that the TiVo downloads the program guide and parses it, removing any need for you to manually calculate when your shows begin and end, and enabling it to automatically find and record episodes of shows you've watched or shows it thinks you might like.

So chances are, connecting an FM radio to the line-in on a soundcard and scheduling LAME from cron is not quite what was intended here. The original poster notes that some of the stations in question change format frequently during the day, in which case it is doubly important to have some intelligence in the recorder so that it can adapt and pick out the diamonds in the radio rough.

As for my own suggestions, I've actually been giving this some thought recently after getting a radio again (had mine stolen). Something like the GNURadio project, a wideband multichannel receiver, could pull down RDS streams (Radio Data Service, which transmits at least station identification and sometimes program names) and parse them for TiVo-like functionality. Alternatively, you could see if any of the stations in question export their schedules using RSS or some such (some college stations do) or pull down and parse their coming-up-next webpages.

I agree!

I get to listen to various NPR shows (and cool and weird shows on the local university station [kdvs.org]) pretty much only when I'm in the car. This means whenever I'm on the way to work, or on the way back... so some days I get to hear what's on at 8am... some days, what's on at 10am.

Heck, I've even missed a word or part of a song (busy driving, or passenger saying something), and had the itch to hit some imaginary 'instant replay button' like I have on my TiVo remote. :)

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of this... frankly, I thought maybe I was just odd. ;)

Replay Radio!

Replay Radio [applian.com]

This works great for any internet streaming radio shows!
joe.

Use SoX and fmtools

I have a radio card in my computer which feeds through my sound card's input line.

Using the 'fm' utility from fmtools [exploits.org], my script tunes to the proper FM station and sets the volume.

Then I call SoX [sourceforge.net] to grab the output stream in WAV format from the soundcard, and pipe it through to lame, which turns it into a mp3 in realtime (takes about 40% CPU time on my 1GHz P3).

The command looks something like this:

sox -t ossdsp -c 2 -w -s -r 44100 /dev/dsp -t wav - | lame -h -k - "radio-`date +%Y%m%d-%k%M`.mp3"

Put all that together in a script that's called by at or cron, and you're in business!

Tivo-like?

The problem you'll have in trying to make it a Tivo-like unit is the acquiring and providing of accurate listings for all the small radio stations (as well as the larger ones!). A Tivo can only operate as it does (all the clever automatic recording of other programmes you might like) because it has a well-maintained, categorised listings database.

Tivo ... npr

I use this site all the time, check it out.. here is a cached version
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:4CQY1kw1nD0C: www.publicradiofan.com/+publicradiofan&hl=en&ie=UT F-8
and
http://www.publicradiofan.com

8-second rewind feature

The Tivo feature I wish I had for radio was the pause and the 8-second instant rewind feature. In addition to recording programs, the box is always recording a rolling 30-minute (or more--dunno, mine's old) period to its memory/disk buffer. If you need to pause the program you are watching, or if you missed something and want to rewind, the option is available at all times, not just when you had the foresight to hit the record button.

The various ways of capturing sound card input are fine for archiving scheduled programs, but what kind of setup allows for buffering of a live audio stream?

What if you just connect the FM receiver output to the Tivo input? Will it complain about the lack of a video signal?

Give Messer a try

Go to http://www.dago.pmp.com.pl/messer/ and give Messer a try. It's meant for recording lectures and presentations on a regular schedule, but it can obviously be made to record recurring radio programs. I've used it for this purpose in the past. Can write to .wav or directly to .mp3 files.

Big $$$ to be made

There is big money ($$$) to be made if someone can make a Tivo-like device for home and car radios. This device will enable home users to record talk shows at specific times without user intervention, just like the Tivo so we can fast forward past commercials, also to enable the archiving of the program to our computer in different formats so we can take them on the go on our MP3 players. This same one device will be compatible with a device that will be installed in our cars that will enable us to play the recorded shows from our home/pc device/program. The car Tivo-like radio will provide a 30-minute buffer and an 8-second rewind function and, as stated before, to play our recordings from another device encoder, and maybe add additional data to the storage medium to eject it from the car device player and take it with us.

We know we all like listening to talk shows, NPR, Rush Limbaugh, lawyer or home and garden shows, including ART BELL's Coast-To-Coast (I know, Art is gone, but I still feel it's Art's baby) for use day-walkers who can't stay up at night and listen about the latest government conspiracy or alien abduction.

The hardware already exists - may require hacking

I got the coolest mp3 player for Christmas. It's the Archos Jukebox FM Recorder. Basically, it's a 20gig hard-drive mp3 player that will record from any source using the line-in jack. BUT, it also has an FM radio built-in and it will record from the FM tuner. Unfortunately, this must be done by manual control. It came bundled with MusicMatch Jukebox which will record to your pc any available line input and even includes a timer for delayed recording. This still doesn't have much 'smarts', however. It won't turn on the Archos device or change the station, but if you leave it turned on and tuned to the right station, it should work. Bottom line is this: the hardware exists as an integrated unit in the Archos Jukebox FM Recorder to do exactly what you're asking. Hopefully some industrious (and more skilled than myself) person can develop a hack to add the necessary brains to the device.

Existing Radio's and software

Someone else mentioned DLink USB Radio's (which are rebadged Gemtek units. http://flesko.cz/ is a site for Radiator - an aftermarket app for use with the above (and many other brands of radio card). A great application that does pretty much all the things you're asking.

This is a start...

http://www.neurosaudio.com/
I don't believe it can do timed recording, but it seems like something it could be upgraded to do...

Portable, Digital, and Automatic Radio VCR

A cool stand-alone hardware solution that's not quite a radio TiVo (but close) is the Radio Program Recorder (RPR) (http://www.radioprogramrecorder.com [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.