At 10:00 PM 12/10/2002 -0600, Jim wrote:
On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Tim May wrote:
> (Sidebar: I often wish for TIVO radio.
It's called cron and your friendly TV card w/ FM radio.
There are also USB-controlled external radios from people like D-Link.
(They don't use the USB for audio, just for control, so the audio
goes into your PC's sound card.)
The one I have is a couple of years old, from D-Link.
I assume their newer ones have better software;
the stuff that came with mine is amazingly lame.
Hugh Daniel is using similar hardware, with much nicer software
that runs on Linux, and he was pleased with it when
we last talked about it.
The D-Link GUI got a really pretty user interface, and you can control
what time to start and stop recording, but not what _day_,
so it's only good for same-day recordings on one channel,
and it only saves the output in WAV format. It was basically designed
for live play, not for TiVoing.
There's a freeware MP3 encoder included, but first you need enough
disk space to save the sounds uncompressed (actually twice that much,
because it caches it and saves a separate copy of the parts you tell it to.)
Back when 2GB disk drives were large, this was annoying,
and now that I've got a 120GB drive, I haven't tried it again.
(Actually my machine had a 6GB drive, but that was 4GB for Linux and
2GB for Windows.) Also, there's a substantial difference in the
sound quality between playing it live and saving the WAV file,
probably because I was using a $5 sound card.
