[LINK] Music

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Hi all,

Good old David Pogue, the tech-guru for the New York Times, writes about
a great new beta service for music lovers: http://www.dar.fm Have a look
and listen .. perhaps first via their, "See How It Works" main page link.

Pogue writes, "So, here’s the bottom line: DAR.fm is a joy to use, it’s 
simple enough to be idiotproof, and the sound quality is very good. And 
it’s absolutely free. 

State of the Art: "A Library of Listening, Made by You"

By DAVID POGUE  Published: May 25, 2011
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/technology/personaltech/26pogue.html?
ref=technology>


Want to know the real problem with the digital age? 

There’s not enough to listen to. 

I mean, what is there, other than your iPod music, your phone, AM/FM 
radio, satellite radio, podcasts, Internet radio stations, Pandora, 
Rhapsody, Napster, Slacker, Live365 and maybe one or two hundred other 
sources? 

I kid, of course. 

The thing is, though, they’re all compromises. The free ones don’t let 
you choose exactly what you want to hear or when; the ones that do cost 
money. 

But that’s about to change. One phrase should tell you all you need to 
know about the latest development: free TiVo for radio. 

That’s the promise of DAR.fm, a Web site that lists every single radio 
show on every one of 1,800 AM and FM stations across the country. (It 
stands for Digital Audio Recorder.) 

You can search, sort, slice and dice those listings any way you want: by 
genre, by radio station, by search phrase. It’s all here: NPR, Rush 
Limbaugh, Glenn Beck. Music shows. Talk shows. Religion, sports, 
technology. Politics by the pound. 

You don’t know or care when your show will actually be aired, or on what 
station. You only know that you’ve requested it. Shortly thereafter, an e-
mail message lets you know that your freshly baked show is ready for 
listening. 

You get every episode, automatically. And why not? It’s not your hard 
drive they’re filling up. You get two gigabytes of free storage, enough 
for about 100 hours of recorded shows. If you fill in the application 
page at MP3Tunes.com, you get a free upgrade to 10 gigabytes. That’s 500 
hours of radio, which is almost enough to cover your next layover at 
O’Hare. 

And here’s the best part: you can listen absolutely anywhere. 

For starters, you can listen right there on the DAR.fm Web page. The page 
that lists your recordings wasn’t designed by, you know, Monet, but it 
gets the job done. You can pause, rewind and fast-forward through your 
recordings, and there are 30-second skip forward/skip backward buttons. 

Actually, maybe this part is even better: Many radio stations transmit 
the names of the songs and bands they’re playing. DAR.fm captures that 
information and detects song breaks. 

In other words, if you record a day or so of a music station, you’ve 
suddenly got a tidy list of songs, identified (and sortable) by title or 
band. You can listen to individual songs, skip the turkeys and otherwise 
enjoy your totally free song collection. It’s crazy cool, like a hybrid 
of iTunes and satellite radio. 

You can also listen to your recordings on an app phone, using a free app 
for that purpose. (The app for iPhone is called Airband; for Android, 
it’s MP3Tunes; for Windows Phone 7, Locker Player; for WebOS, MP3tunes.) 

Can you imagine having the last few weeks’ worth of every worthwhile 
radio show, right on your phone? Sure, subscribing to podcasts achieves a 
similar goal — but not every show is available as a podcast. And this 
way, you never have to sync your phone with your computer. 

For best results, listen when your phone is in a Wi-Fi hot spot. 
Otherwise, streaming music will rip through your monthly data allowance 
like the winner of a hot-dog-eating contest. 

Or use the trick described at dar.fm/faq.php. It tells you how to 
download your recordings, so you can listen to them later without an 
Internet connection. (Yes, you can even download individual songs that 
you captured. The record-company lawyers must love that part.) 

Even more intriguingly, you can listen to your recordings on an actual, 
physical radio. You know, one of those tabletop things with speakers and 
knobs. These days, they come with wireless Internet connections — which 
is all DAR.fm needs to know. 

The Wi-Fi radios from Grace Digital ($80 to $200) list DAR.fm right on 
the main menu. Selecting that source instantly presents your list of 
recorded radio shows. 

But Grace radios aren’t your only option. The person who created DAR.fm 
also runs a company called MP3Tunes.com. It’s an online storage locker 
for your music files, so that you can play them from any computer or 
phone, anywhere you go. 

(If this sounds familiar, it’s because Amazon introduced a nearly 
identical service last month, called Amazon Cloud Player. Google just 
opened a "cloud music locker" service, too. Needless to say, the 
headlines about this "new" kind of music service drives the MP3Tunes guy 
crazy; his site has been in operation for four years.) 

Whenever you record a show at DAR.fm, it shows up automatically in your 
MP3Tunes.com music locker. And the contents of that locker are viewable, 
and playable, on 30 different Wi-Fi radio models from various 
manufacturers, and even the Roku set-top TV box. 

The Logitech Squeezebox is one of them, and it’s representative of how 
you would get to your recorded radio shows. You set up by installing an 
MP3Tunes app and putting it on your main menu. Thereafter, you choose 
MP3Tunes; then, in the next menu, Playlists. Inside, you’ll find all your 
recorded shows. So — another couple of steps. 

Shows recorded at DAR.fm automatically appear in your MP3Tunes.com music 
locker, the contents of which are viewable on 30 Wi-Fi radio models, such 
as the Logitech Squeezebox. 

(The Squeezebox can also accommodate a battery, sold separately, so “All 
Things Considered” can follow you around the house as you do your 
springtime chores.) 

So here’s the bottom line: DAR.fm is a joy to use, it’s simple enough to 
be idiotproof, and the sound quality is very good. And it’s absolutely 
free. 

Where’s the catch? 

First, it won’t always be free. The company intends to incorporate ads at 
some point — not audio ads, but text ads that appear in your app or the 
screen of your radio. 

Second, you have to wonder about the legality of all this. 

The company says that it’s in the clear. It points to a 2008 case 
involving Cablevision, the cable company, which offered its subscribers a 
service that could record your favorite TV shows by remote control — like 
a TiVo, except that the recording machines were at Cablevision and not at 
your house. The judge ruled that this plan was O.K. because Cablevision 
wasn’t actually making copies of copyrighted material; it was creating 
separate recording for each customer who requested it. 

That’s what DAR says it’s doing. If 8,000 people all record a certain 
episode of “Fresh Air,” then, by golly, it makes 8,000 copies of that 
audio file at its headquarters. Seems wasteful, but hey — that’s what the 
judge wants. 

Third, there are a few minor features that might be nice to add. 

The main one is that you have to program your recordings on the Web — you 
can’t do it from your physical Wi-Fi radio. Similarly, if you’re 
listening to a live show on your Wi-Fi radio, there’s no Record button. 

But those complaints sound like an application for the Nitpickers 
Society. DAR.fm is fantastic, useful, easy to use and free. It’s real 
TiVo for radio. It lets you time shift, of course, but also presents the 
entire universe of radio broadcasting in one tidy menu. No longer must 
you gripe about the creeping commercialism that shut down, say, your 
town’s NPR affiliate or ’70s reggae station. Suddenly there are 1,800 
radio stations in your town — and they program their shows according to 
your schedule, not theirs. 

You’ve complained about having nothing to listen to for the very last time
--

Cheers,
Stephen