“Radioshift” is a Mac-only audio recording tool that works like a DVR for both streaming internet radio stations and—with the addition of the $50 Griffin Radio Shark—AM/FM over-the-air stations. I do most of my radio listening via podcasts, but since not every station has jumped on that wagon, I could see this being a useful tool for filling in the cracks.
Radioshift is $32 after a two-week trial and includes a free content guide with over 50,000 radio stations.
Product Page [Rogue Amoeba via Daring Fireball]
Radioshift is great in theory, but if it encounters any kind of trouble trying to connect to a stream it gives up and doesn’t re-try. As a result about 1 in 10 of your recordings actually take place. Hopefully they’ll fix this soon, but right now it is a huge disappointment.
This is cool. What would be even cooler would be if you could listen to terrestrial radio live, but with a slight delay of just a few seconds. This is particularly useful for live sporting events. The announcers on the radio are much better than the annoying hacks they get to call the games on TV. However, the radio signal has less of a delay in getting to your house compared to cable or satellite television.
Also, how about removing commercials from the terrestrial radio? That’s the #1 reason I stick to podcasts.
the trial also (claims) to nudge down the quality after 20 mins of use … I love the idea and concept … i wonder how they deal with eventual buffering while recording … would that be cut out or just recorded ??? For exploring things like that I wish the trial would be a bit more lenient …
I’m a big fan of their other audio tools and use AudioHijack quite a lot. It’s pretty reliable and I believe it patches into the CoreAudio module in the kernel and captures output from there, so if it does the same here it should be reasonably reliable as long as you’re not thrashing the disk or CPU with anything else.