Auto Switching Radio Stations

Today's idea addresses a problem that only some people will have with some stations in some locations.

Certain smaller stations will have multiple frequencies depending on your exact location relative to your local urban center. The station is served on different frequencies in different areas. The North suburbs might have 102.1 while downtown might have the station on 95.5 for example.

These tend to be, in my experience, smaller less popular stations.

The result is that you can be driving along and have the station die out or become unclear. If you wish to continue listening to the station it requires you to switch over to the other station. This can be problematic if you stumbled across the station while surfing for something to listen to (and thus do not know that they have multiple frequencies), or if the station used more than two frequencies so that you need to figure out which one will end up being most clear.

Digital radio signals can let the radio know the station name and name of the song and artist currently playing. It would also be possible for the signal to have alternative frequency information embedded into it. If the signal detected noise from static (something your radio can already do, this is how it autotunes), it would quickly check the alternative frequencies to see if any of them were clearer.

This could also be used with syndicated radio shows that are being hosted on multiple stations. If the signal of the station you were listening on grew too weak, it could automatically check the signal of other stations hosting the show at that time.

This would increase the cost of the radio (just like digital radios cost more). It would need a bit more hardware to figure out how to flip frequencies, and it would likely need multiple tuners (to allow it to check the other frequencies without interrupting what you are listening to). However, these costs would not be too great. They would also lay some of the hardware groundwork for another one of my ideas, a radio Tivo.

Ultimately, as I said earlier, this would only be useful some of the time for some people. However, when dealing with these types of small stations, retuning into them is very annoying. I feel that the people who DO have to deal with this would greatly appreciate the functionality, and it would almost certainly help the listenership of these small stations.

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.

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.