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."

How bout a winamp plugin?

[Screaming Lunatic]

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.

How many stations?

[MrResistor]

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.

DAB radios

[Random Hamster]

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.

I have this working with Replay TV

[pinbot]

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.

Radio TiVO for Windows

[DoctorRad]

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

Dr. Matt...