HD Radio Recording In the US? 303
unreceivedpacket writes "The public radio stations I listen to have been advertising their conversion to HD Radio format for some time. They advertise multiple channels, their second channel playing all classical, all the time. I am interested in purchasing a receiver so I can listen to this extra content, and was also hoping to find a receiver with a built-in recorder so I could time-shift programs that are not otherwise available as legal pod-casts. My initial queries have returned few models that support any kind of digital recording, and the existing ones seem out of production or sorely lacking features. Is this the state of Digital Radio in the US? Are there any legal recording devices for HD Radio? Any good solutions for recording and time-shifting, perhaps through Linux?"
Liberate the Spectrum. (Score:5, Interesting)
Liberate the specturm [greaterdemocracy.org] or you will suffer digital restrictions [slashdot.org]. Vista's checking of line voltages to make sure no one has clipped on an analog recording device should tell you where all of this is going. The RIAA has been screaming about "radio pirates" for 50 years. Digital broadcast gives them a way to close the "analog hole" they so dread. If the makers colude with broadcasters, only "authorized" players will have keys to decode "HD" signals. If the specturm is liberated, everything will be high quality because no one but big publishers wants to degrade music.
Please read before posting... please! (Score:5, Interesting)
Please be aware that not everyone who browses slashdot has our best interests at heart. Any commercial method to circumvent DRM will be jumped upon by our broadcast content overlords. Any non-commercial method will be legislated out of existence... the longer the media cartels remain in the dark, the longer we have to enjoy our right to timeshift content.
Like usenet... the first rule of usenet is that you don't talk about usenet.
Sorry for the pessimism and tinfoilhattery, but this entire ask slashdot question just screams "honeypot" to me, even if that wasn't its intent.
not a problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Liberate the Spectrum. (Score:3, Interesting)
I will never subscribe to a paid radio service (like Sirius or XM), and I'm currently looking to the the hell away from cable. I hate paying for commercials.
I am one of the people who care about this.
Re:Liberate the Spectrum. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Liberate the Spectrum. (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone who pays for telecommunication services or publishes should care about spectrum. The spectrum belongs to the public and there is no longer a need for it to be allocated by government the way 100 year old radios required. Free spectrum would bring you vastly cheaper communications and true always on internet.
Re:A couple of possibilities (Score:2, Interesting)
XM and Sirius have significantly less bandwidth to use per channel compared to digital radio. The sound quality of digital radio is much better as a result.
I wouldn't mind recording digital radio, because it sounds as good as or better than a lot of MP3s you find on the 'net.
Re:Please read before posting... please! (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember back when all you needed was a radio with a cassette player and you could have all the free mix tapes you wanted. Even then they wanted to tax blank tapes because of all the "rampant copying". Yeah... They really had to worry about the collapse of their business model from the Chromium(IV) Oxide threat back then.~
The bottom line is that any commercial method is likely to be introduced by a licensed manufacturer, and non-commercial methods will be achieved through the analog headphone jack and a line-in digital recorder. They gave consent for the former, and I can't really see where they can outlaw the latter.
These days I'm still more concerned with their barratry against every day civilians than their ability to come up with legitimate means to prevent unauthorized duplications.
Re:Please read before posting... please! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you know of a solution, don't write it in this discussion!
Sigh. The idea that you can hide your anti-DRM activity from OBCOs is absurd. Their minions, both software and carbon-based, have infiltrated every web site, every mailing list, every chat channel. It's just not that hard.
Rather than trying to hide from the OBCOs, people with disapproved knowledge should share their knowledge with as many people as possible. When information exists on a few furtive web sites, it can easily be suppressed. When it's on thousands of web sites, there's no getting rid of it.
Consider the first lyrics server at lyric.ch. When it was the only lyrics server, the IP lawyers were on faster than flies on shit. But now there are thousands of lyrics sites, and the lawyers have given up.
Re:Go Satellite instead... (Score:5, Interesting)
I really think the FCC screwed the pooch by giving Ibiquity a monopoly on HD radio with their halfassed system. Now you can pay a licensing fee to build the receiver for a service that barely works at all. I was originally excited about HD radio too because I thought it would be like Digital TV, where you can distribute a crystal clear picture out to where the channel would normally get a bit fuzzy and deal more elegantly with having channels directly adjacent to yours (a big problem around here, where sometimes stations will have stations on either side of the dial and most radio receivers will end up mixing your signal with the adjacent ones randomly when you're driving down the road). Instead we have a system where you practically never get an HD lock.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
new tech (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, HD radio is a new technology and one that isn't being very actively marketed. I have a feeling that the main reason for this is that most people are just fine with the audio quality of normal radio. Also, the medium of radio has been destroyed over the last few decades so now 99% of the people who listen to radio these days just have it on as background music in their cards or at work. You don't need high definition and a fancy receiver for that kind of use. People who want actual content coming through their speakers subscribe to satellite radio although I hear the (content) quality of that is starting to go downhill too.
Probably the best solution for the sumitter for now is simply to buy a regular receiver and plug it into the sound card of a PC. Use an IR blaster for changing the channel, turning the receiver on and off, etc.
Many Linux-compatible TV tuners come with FM tuners built-in, I suspect it's only a matter of time until they start putting HD radio tuners on those too.
Re:HD streaming radio (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean digital streaming radio. It's silly to call WCPE's 20 bps stream "HD".
My own favorite source of streams is the Aussie ABC network [abc.net.au] (90 bps!). Their "classical" channel is particularly refreshing because they define the term very broadly. Also a lot of good podcasts [abc.net.au].
XM Radio recording (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Please read before posting... please! (Score:3, Interesting)
Too late. As of Monday, AT&T broadband has deleted a large group of alt newsgroups, especially the alt.binaries tree. There were a group of us in alt.binaries.midi that used to swap our midi compositions and arrangements, including the brilliant James Pitt-Payne, who singlehandedly has been keeping the turn of the 20th century popular piano music alive through this newsgroup. If it hadn't been for his (and others') exceptional contributions, a great deal of public domain music that exists only in piano rolls and wire recordings would never reach those of us who are interested in these things.
Fucking AT&T. First they help the Bush Administration break the law by snooping on us without judicial oversight, and now this. It's nice to know that we live in a "free market" economy, where corporations are concerned about what the consumers want, no?
Re:Liberate the Spectrum. (Score:2, Interesting)
On a related note, they will attack the M Hole next... with content so lame that you won't remember it.
Re:Liberate the Spectrum. (Score:3, Interesting)
Vista's checking of line voltages to make sure no one has clipped on an analog recording device should tell you where all of this is going.
Bullshit. Here's why:
Anyone with even a yard-sale-quality stereo amplifier could defeat any such thing - the voltage (and amperage, resistance/impedance, wattage, etc) from the computer audio line-out to the amp's line-in jack would remain within exactly the same expected range during runtime, no matter how much recording equipment you daisy-chained onto the amp's AUX-out line.
IOW: Once it goes analog, it's all mine... and unless someone, somewhere dreams up a "digital" speaker rig-up that could stand a hope in Hell of competing with the cone-and-coil construction found in 99% of all speakers built in this world, there ain't jack shit that Microsoft Vista (or anyone else) can do about that - it's a matter of simple physics.
Given that even Microsoft is smart enough to know this, why would they even bother to try once the signal hit the outbound wires?
Re:Liberate the Spectrum. (Score:2, Interesting)
+ ted is even better. http://www.ted.nu/ [www.ted.nu].
It's more or less a cronjob that will check for your shows (new uploads to tvrss.net or other sites), and download the torrents for you. Poor man's tivo, and you don't have to do anything if you set up your shows and let it download for you.
How in the hell (Score:3, Interesting)
Can Vista "check the line voltage" ?
Re:HD streaming radio (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Liberate the Spectrum. (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember, current bands where "anything goes" aren't quite like that: they have strict power limits,
And I suppose it never occurred to you that the FCC could limit power here in the same way as 2.4?
If you do some research, the FCC was VERY close to legalizing low power FM stations, but then the measure just quietly died.
You can put on a tin foil hat here, but I would bet good money some corporations slipped some money under the table to the right person, and some low-end competition was killed.
So see, it is possible to kill competition without even having a transmitter.
Re:"HD Radio" means CD quality. (Score:2, Interesting)
It doesn't mean BluRay, HD-DVD, DVD-A or SACD quality audio. Just CD quality audio. Most terrestrial radio stations simulcast in "HD", you just need a receiver.
Bull. At best, it's like a low-bitrate MP3. That's nowhere near "CD quality".
Re:Audio Quality (Score:2, Interesting)
Heavily-compressed audio is obnoxious when you're listening to it in a quiet environment, but most people listen to radio in their cars, where there's a huge amount of background noise and a relatively small loudness 'window' between the noise floor and the maximum desirable volume.
If radio stations didn't compress their audio, especially for classical music and other programming with lots of dynamic range, people would have to constantly adjust the volume.
What would be better would be if the radios had the compressors built into them, so listeners could change the amount of compression/expansion they want. People in very quiet luxury cars could keep it turned down, while people listening with the windows down at highway speeds could crank it up to keep the speakers working nonstop.
Unfortunately, automobiles are far from an optimal place to listen to high-quality music, but they're the place where most radio listening is done, and tailored towards.
Re:Go Satellite instead... (Score:3, Interesting)
HD Radio is particularly nasty because of the high licensing fees and the noise produced by sticking digital where it doesn't belong.
http://www.ham-radio.com/k6sti/hdrsn.htm [ham-radio.com]
http://www.am-dx.com/amiboc.htm [am-dx.com]
You won't be able to record any type of broadcast (Score:1, Interesting)
This whole shenanigan is about control. We don't *need* HD/Digital radio but as soon as the broadcast flag becomes mandated it's all over for us consumers. No more recording at all. The fair use we have always enjoyed just went out the window. You can't even buy a DVR (or DVCR for that matter) to record OTH HDTV anymore, you must rent it from your local cable/dish monopoly. It's sickening. The government sold all the analog spectrum and mandated DTV to keep us all in line, the same way the internet is headed if we don't revolt.
Re:Go Satellite instead... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:from a broadcasters perspective.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm particularly upset about the use of the term "HD Radio" which people may associate with High Definition. The fact is that HD stands for Hybrid Data which actually sounds quite crappy. I prefer analog FM for it's higher fidelity. Ain't that sad?