Review: PogoProducts' Radio Your Way

An anonymous reader writes "Being a long time TiVo-head and a talk radio junkie, I've been waiting for the first commercially available PVR for radio (PAR?). PogoProducts finally released just such a product, which they call 'Radio Your Way'. After seeing the announcement on Slashdot I quickly placed my order and have now been using it for about a week. The following is a quick rundown of the good and the bad."

The Good

The product has a decent form factor and intuitive buttons for playback. It has a 3V DC-in so you can keep it powered in your car (a $15 3V car adapter from RadioShack did the trick for me), a line-in port for recording from external sources, and of course a USB port for transferring files to your PC.

Recording is fairly straight forward. There is a red button on the front that is used for manually starting and stopping recording of the current 'mode' (AM/FM/Voice), and a timer function which allows up to 10 scheduled recordings to be programmed. There is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to scheduling these recordings, but once you understand the controls it's quite easy to add or modify scheduled recordings. You can set up repeating recordings for a given day (Mon, Tues, Wed., etc.), every day, or Mon-Sat (which I thought was a bit odd - why not Mon-Fri?). A really nice feature of the scheduled recordings is that the device will automatically turn on and off before and after recording stops, meaning you don't have to worry about wasting batteries by leaving the unit on 24/7.

Listening to recordings is a breeze. There are standard next/prev and FF/RW buttons that work like a VCR. If you FF a selection that is not playing it moves extremely fast, and if you FF while playing it scans - allowing you to hear the content zipping along so you know when the commercial is over, for example.

The internal memory holds approximately 4 hours of audio, and can be supplemented with SD/MMC cards giving you up to 1 Gig of storage and days of recording time.

The device comes with a desktop application for transferring, playing, and converting files. I haven't used it much but my first impressions were positive. No complaints here.

The Bad

Given that this is a 1.0 product and the first of its kind (as far I know), I fully expected there to be some usability issues and missing features. I was right. The most notable missing feature is the ability to pause a live recording. This is apparently due to the fact that there is no 'always on' buffer ala TiVo. How many times have you been listening to the radio and wanted to rewind 10 seconds because you missed something? Pausing live radio seems like an obvious feature for a Radio PVR, but you won't get it with Radio Your Way. Live recording is strictly a manual option - hit the red button to record, hit the stop button to stop, then back up and listen to what was recorded. This is very archaic for someone used to the power of TiVo. Hitting the red button while recording actually pauses the recording, which I suppose could be useful for on the fly editing of commercials. However, the lack of a true 'pause live radio' feature is a serious drawback that I'm sure will be corrected in future versions, even if it's a small buffer.

Other disappointments:

- No manual 'auto stop' feature. I'd like to be able to hit record and tell it to stop in a given amount of time. Unfortunately if you hit record you have to manually hit stop or it will continue recording until the memory is filled of the batteries run out.
- Uses AAA batteries instead of a chargeable system.
- Reception is so-so.
- Very poor speaker quality - stick with headsets or car adapter.
- No off button! As far as I can tell, once you turn the device on there is no way to manually turn it off other than to wait for it to enter sleep mode after several minutes. Very annoying.
- Overall the device feels a bit cheap, particularly the volume control button. This ain't no iPOD.
- Poorly written manual.
-A bit pricey at $150.

--- Conclusions ---
Despite the drawbacks listed above, Iï½m happy with the Radio Your Way from PogoProducts. It gives me the basic ability to time-shift AM/FM programming in a small, lightweight, portable package. I wouldn't use it for recording FM music - stick with traditional MP3 players for that. But for those of us that are addicted to talk radio (I'm a day one P1 for those of you in Dallas) it's a good solution, and will tide you over until the next generation of devices comes to market.

practicality

Sounds like a good idea, but I don't see this catching on to the extent that Tivo has even if they do make the improvements suggested in the article.
There's just too much of a lack of quality radio programming these days for me to ever consider buying one of these.

Would've been cool to have in the 1950's-60's though when families used to gather around the radio rather than a TV set.

Re:practicality

It would have been cool to have the internet back in the 50's as well, but it was still a glimmer in Al Gore's eye at that point.

:P

I want it!

Every time I hear something on the radio that I want to replay, my hand makes the same motion I use for my PVR and I wonder why this product isn't out on the market already. Now it is... imagine, radio without commercials as long as you are "behind" the broadcast in time.

Time to start hunting the web for the best price!

Re:I want it! - Hold your cash for now...

From the article:

"The most notable missing feature is the ability to pause a live recording"

It's just a recorder and not a time shifter... yet :)

Pavlov would be proud

Every time I hear something on the radio that I want to replay, my hand makes the same motion I use for my PVR...

Do you drool everytime you hear a bell too?

Neither First nor Unique

The "Radio Personal Recorder" from RPR Products out of Tucson has been around for a while, I thought. Specs, etc., can be found
here [radioprogramrecorder.com].

First and Unique

Uh, actually, the RPR product appears to be several devices chained together, rather than the sigle device reviewed. I'm sure any of us could figure out how to use the 'audio out' in conjunction with the 'mic' jack on just about anything to successfully record.

Neither First nor Unique - Look at iRiver Products

I've had an iRiver iFP-395TC for about three months now ( http://www.iriveramerica.com [iriveramerica.com]). It is an 512MB MP3 player with FM receiver/recorder and memo recorder.

The higher end of the iFP line has these features with varying amounts of Flash. Memos and recordings can be uploaded into a PC. It doesn't have a "pause" feature, like you would want on a "PAR". I've been using it to record "The House of Blues" on the weekend and then listen to it at my desk at work.

Nice box and I highly recommend it. Too bad its so hard to find (rumour has it Best Buy [bestbuy.com] stocks different models of the iFP line but I have never seen them in stock). I ended up buying mine directly from iRiver.

myke

One huge flaw IMO

Reception is so-so

Like the equivelant of recoding TV with rabbit ears? To much of pain, even for talk radio. maybe if this came with a subcription to satelite raido.

RIAA???

90% of the stuff you would want to record you can buy on CD... and therefor, according to the RIAA, you're cutting into their CD sales, by not buying music from them, but recording what is being broadcast over the airwaves for free...

Shame on you all...

Oh, and don't even think about using it to skip commercials...

PAR

This eems not at all like tivo functionality. It is more similar to a VCR or as many people on slashdot have already discovered some newer home stereos already allow scheduled recording to a tape deck. For this to be at all useful (to me at least) it would need guide info and at a bare minimum a pause live recording option. I mean really this thing is quite feature bare.

That would make the delay even worse!

Host: We have anonymous reader on the line.
AR: Hello?
Host: Turn your radio down.
AR: Hello?
Host: You need to turn your radio down!
AR: Hello?
*click*
AR: That was rude!

How is this a PAR?

Big deal - this is like a digital tape recorder. To be a true PAR it would need at least these features:
- Guide service. Imagine a recorder that knows what song is playing on the radio right now and saves this 3:26 chunk of audio to "BritneySpearsHotGrits.mp3" for you. At the very least it needs show-based guide service. VCRs have had timers since like 1982.
- Pause live radio (as noted by the review)
- Wishlisting (Find me songs by Aretha Franklin.)

I don't think radio stations advertise what songs they will play ahead of time, but you could imagine that you could scrape the "currently playing" track off the station web site and retroactively label the audio. If the PAR is constantly recording a station, and then it sees a track by Aretha Franklin, it saves that last song for you.

Until something works like this, it's about as useful as a cassette player with a timer.

Never buy 1st run products....

A few years back, I heard about something called an MPTrip CD player, it was the first of it's kind. A portable CD Player that could actually play MP3s.... it was cheep too, only 150 CDN dollars!

I ran out and got one as soon as it came out. Frankly it was a piece of shit, none of the features one would really need like skipping between albums was there. It skipped like MAD, and it sucked battery power like there was no tomorow. Overall, a terrible CD player, it couldn't even play regular CD's!

Needless to say, I stopped using it after about a month. Two years later (or a few weeks ago) I picked up a second mp3 CD player, this one rocks and actually works. The product has been seriously refined since the first one came out, and I am very satisfied.

From reading "The Bad" part of this review I see that the author is having the same sort of problems... I guess the message is: hmmm thats cool, but I'll wait until Panasonic, Sony, or anyother reputable company makes one.

Other radio time-shifting substitutes

This topic, and device, was last discussed on Slashdot May 12th [slashdot.org] (found via slashdot search for "radio your way".)

Two links I found useful were a a competing piece of hardware, Neuros [neurosaudio.com], and a much cheaper substitute if the radio program is streamed on the internet, Replay Radio [replay-radio.com]. Plus an even earlier Slashdot thread [slashdot.org].

In fairness, this is not a dupe, as the May 12th thread was about 'future' products and this is a product review.

--LP

Not a "RaVo"

I wouldn't compare this at all to a TiVo. It's more like a digital audio recorder. The best features of TiVo (and similar) are the live buffer and the automatic scheduling (Wishlists). Other than the internal memory replacing a cassette tape, this is just a Walkman with a timer.

If I can tell it to automatically record every episode of NPR's All Things Considered (NOT 'record anything on channel X at 8:00 PM every Friday'), then we'll talk.

Killer Application:

School closings during snowstorms.

We've all tuned in time to hear "Tangoville" announced and had to sit and wait for them to work all they way around the alphabet to get back to "Sierraville" for you.

what's the point?

The state of radio today is so bad, I can't imagine a use for this device.

Why record anything when you can be sure that whatever you just heard will be repeated an hour later? I don't need to record stuff off the radio so I can listen to it later, the radio station already solves that problem by looping the same 10 songs over and over again.

Time-compressed playback

Another feature that audio players should make use of is time-compressed playback, digitally speeding up the audio without "chipmunking." You might be able to squeeze 20% more time out in addition to commercial skipping. I wouldn't recommend it for music, of course.

Personally, I'd avoid Pogo if you're a Linuxer...

I bought (and still have) one of their flash-based mp3 recorder/players. Despite some quirks, I like the device, but I'm not happy with how the company handled my invitation to port their MP3 manager software to linux.

Because the player is flash-based, you can only upload/download mp3s using the Windows MP3 manager software. Having done projects like this in the past, I offered to port the manager software to linux for the company, free of charge.

My offer was immediately accepted, but came with an NDA regarding any code they would send me. After I explained that if I were going to do it for free, I'd want it to be open source, I never heard another word, despite several followup emails.

The company has obviously decided against open source of any of their products, though I can't imagine why. If someone really gave a shit what the download/upload protocol was for their software, it would be fairly trivial to reverse it.

So anyway, bear this in mind if you think Pogo is the company for you. You'll be using their stuff on windows or via an emaulator. Jeff

More issues

I also pre-ordered one and have been playing with it for a week or so. First off, you can turn it off by holding the Stop button down for 2-3 seconds.

I got mine not so much as a portable device, but as the first thing I'd found that could do timed recordings from radio. Thus, I'm plugging it in and leaving it next to the computer with the idea of burning programs to CD to listen at the car later.

There are two problems with this:

1. If the USB cable is plugged in, everything else is disabled, including recording. So make very sure you remember to unplug it after transferring files.

2. The recording quality is very low --- by default only 16Kbps. You can switch that to 32Kbps (using twice the space) by holding the EQ button down for a couple seconds (something you have to carefully read the table of button functions to find out), but even 32Kbps is barely good enough for decent speech. Don't expect to record real music with this.

3. Reception is worse than "so-so" in my book. While strong stations do come in fine, there's a local station run out of a high school that is the only classical station in Portland (KBPS) that I like. It comes in just fine on every other radio in the house and car, but this thing can't even pick up a hint of it (well, maybe a weak hint once in a while if you listen through the static enough). And that's with the antennae plugged in (which works through the earphone jack). I was hoping to record shows like Carl Haas and Shickele Mix off here, but with both the low recording quality and the fact that it can't pick up the station anyhow, I'm outta luck on that.

4. For some reason, probably relating to cpu performance I'm guessing, they record to a proprietary format, not mp3. The desktop application will convert to wav, and then you can mp3 that, but I imagine that only makes the sound worse (I haven't really tried it yet, only the wav conversion). The conversion to .wav blows the file size up about a factor of almost 20 (at least on the one I did it to: 14M -> 225M).

So, while it's an interesting toy, it's definitely V1.0. I may end up using it as a portable voice recorder, but I'm planning on recording some shows that are talk only like Science Friday and a local group's weekly local issues speech and Q&A show.

How about OZradio for a software/pc solution...

OZradio [sourceforge.net] is written by Gary Baker South Australia. The purpose of OZradio is to provide a simple and easy to use application to play and Record FM Radio on BTTV Compatible cards.

This looks like a great option for all you radio fans out there, its open source and it even records to ogg.

OZRadio will now build or execute on a Linux system that has KDE, GNOME, ICEWM, XFCE etc.. with or without GNOME libraries

From the FAQ:

Why OZradio
I am Gary Baker from South Australia, I live in Adelaide and due to my Age/Generation am probably a bit more of the old fashioned Ozy. Whenever someone has asked me where I am from, for as long as I can remember I have answered South Oz. Why I dont know. Does it have anything to do with Dorothy, no not really. Does it Matter. No not really. Anyway Im pretty happy that I can knock together this code and maybe people from all over the world, religeon, colour, sexuality etc.. doesnt matter, can use it.

Overview
OZradio has been written on a Mandrake 9.0 system running KDE 3.0 with a Brooktree BT878 Video/FM card. It is written in 'C' and the GUI was written using GLADE 1.2 (Excellent GUI Development tool). OZradio will run in either a Gnome or KDE environment although all of my testing is done in KDE. Its probably kind of strange, but I prefer to work in the KDE environment but reckon the GLADE tool is the best GUI development tool for the way I code. One of the drawbacks with supporting both KDE and GNOME with the same binary is the Library requirements. I am considering building Gnome and KDE Versions so as that users do not have to install libraries for both environments to run OZradio.

Development Direction
OZradio is being developed as rapidly as I can. Originally I intended to write an application to play FM radio on BTTV compatible cards and nothing more. But once I did that and realised how simple the base radio player was to write, I thought I would expand it. There are often radio shows I would like to listen to but I am at work so I thought I would record them. This has expanded the development of OZradio.

Most of the base structure is now in place. Heaps of cleanup is needed. I am thinking at the moment of stabilising OZradio at BETA 0.8.2 with full help and Error checking. I am looking to providing Fast Foward, Rewind functions within the playback section and the ability to save parts of a recording to a different file. To complement this I will need to look at supporting mpxx, vorbis, wav etc.. files for export and the ability to replay all these file types which will further expand the capability of OZradio.

OZradio will continue to support both KDE, GNOME and will be developed on Mandrake Linux. I have no intention of and will not port it to any Microsoft environments,

Software Requirements
OZradio requires a 2.4xx kernel and Linux. Both the standard Gnome and Kde Libraries are required and GTK 1.2 or greater is required. No other special libraries or software is needed other than the modules to support your FM/TV card. OZradio assumes you have already installed your card and loaded the required modules etc. to make it work.

Hardware Requirements
OZradio requires some form of FM radio card and a sound card in the computer. Many different types OF FM/TV cards will probably work as I use generic video4linux api calls and access things through /dev/xxxxxxxx . My system is setup with the audio output from the FM/Video card going into the Sound card input. OZradio expects to be able to access /dev/radioxxxx to tune the radio frequencys, /dev/mixer and /dev/dsp to record and playback radio.

Enjoy!

Why the references to TiVO?

The only similarity this seems to have to TiVO is that it records things. Let's take a look at the features...
Scheduled recording... nope
Replay during recording... nope
Play lagged behind recording... nope
Manual record/play/stop action... yes

It appears to be functionally equivalent to a $40 boombox w/ cassette recorder, only for 4x the price and no speakers.

WHAT A DEAL!!! SIGN ME UP FOR ONE. NO WAIT. MAKE IT 100!!!!