Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Streaming Shower Radio

I like to listen to music in the shower.

But after all of my searching come away disappointed in the solutions. The choices available are devices that can play CDs in the radio or play FM/AM radio. Now the moisture eventually ruins the CDs and the radio is inevitably going to get less than ideal reception in many showers. But even if it received decent reception none of them even use digital radio. It' all tuning knob based.

I want a solution that lets me play music from my computer. The best I have seen was a shower radio that came with a low power FM transmitter. So I could listen to my music this way. However, its not a good solution. The transmitter is not very good so the signal is noisy. And to top things off, you have no control over whats playing. And of course, if you forget to start up music and to plug in the transmitter before you get in the shower you are out luck.

I have also seen waterproof IPod cases. Those of course require you to have and IPod and to bring it in.

What I want is a waterproof device that can connect to my home network over wifi. A server program on my PC could then stream music to the 'radio.' Because it is being streamed over wifi the radio can send commands back to the PC server. That means you could have play/pause controls and a method to browser your music collection from the shower.

With an internet connection it could even stream music from online radio services like Pandora.

This is not complicated technology. Devices like this exist in other non-waterproof forms (like fancy alarm clocks). There is nothing standing in the way of a company manufacturing and selling a device like this. It would be significantly more expensive than the low quality shower radios currently on the market, but I can not imagine I am the only person who has a desire for something like this.

1 comment:

  1. Agreed. I want one of these too, and can't find one anywhere.

    ReplyDelete

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