Radio Tivo

While it would not be as useful as on the TV, the ability to pause and rewind live radio would be a nifty feature for a radio. It also wouldn't take much hardware to do. The amount of space audio recordings take is far less than for video recordings.

You could also have scheduled recordings. Once again, while not as useful there have been times where this feature would be great. For example a station I like has an hour long period of commercial free songs (as many do). However, it always plays the hour before I get out of work. When I drive home I get to listen to commercial after commercial on that station. But if my radio could be set to record and save for later that music, well that would just be great.

Of course we are getting into the realm where you would likely want to redesign the radio interface. After all if it is recording things you need a good method of selecting / playing /deleting recordings. Well this sounds like a 'luxury' item anyway so why not just give it a touch screen interface. While you are at it you might as well give it the ability to have the user load mp3s on it and listen to them.

Another feature that it could easily have involves some more recent advances in radio. Most radio stations now transmit digital data that identifies the station, the name of the song they are playing, and the artist. Well the Radio Tivo could segment recordings based on this data. It could even split them up into mp3s and automatically tag them. This information would also allow it to easily skip over commercials.

Now there might be some weird laws or regulations that this would violate. If that is the case though I need to ask "why is it OK on TV and not on the radio." If such a device is legal though I have to wonder why everyone isn't using one already.

There is one 'unintended' consequence. If these became popular, music radio stations would half to reconsider their commercial layout. If people were recording, but then skipping over, commercials I imagine that it would hurt their bottom line. However, I imagine that with the advent of cable DVR boxes there is similar data for how frequently commercials end up skipped over now.