tivo for radio?

I listen to the radio in my car on the drive to and from work most days. One of my favorite programs is called "Forum", an interview program out of San Francisco and hosted by a guy named Michael Krazny. Dr. Krazny is an excellent interviewer and gets some great guests. His program is some of the most informative and educational radio I've found, covering everything from the arts to politics to technology.

I'm a decent driver and the majority of my 30 minute drive to and from work is on a beautiful stretch of interstate highway 280 that's seldom congested. No matter how smooth the drive, I'm always focused primarily on driving -- 2,800 pounds traveling at 90 miles per hour is just a lotta force -- and so I inevitably miss or mis-hear some comment and my immediate, almost unconscious, TiVo-trained, response is to think "rewind".

I know that I can log on to the KQED website later in the day and listen to their archive of the program, but that's a lot of hassle to get at that one sentence or word that I missed. What I really want is a TiVo-like device for my car radio. It doesn't have to have all the TiVo features, just a simple 10-30 minute buffer with pause and rewind would be fine.

I used to listen to music on the radio and I think something like this would be great for that too. I remember there were many times when I got into the car and turned on the radio half way through a song and wanted to hear the whole thing, or missing the name of the artist or album which might have turned into a CD sale if I'd have had a radio with TiVo capabilities.

Do any of you know of such a product? A simple buffer doesn't seem like it'd be that difficult to add, given that most CD players already do this minimally for anti-skip. My portable mp3 CD player holds several minutes of buffer for mp3 tracks. With some compression, I'd think it wouldn't be terribly difficult to get 20 or 30 minutes of stereo buffer or even more if you were OK dropping to mono (which would be fine for most talk radio). If the recording was done at, say, 128 or 192 kbps, it'd probably be totally sufficient for most people listening in their noisy cars but not of such quality that it would lead to lots of pirating. That might not even be a concern if they used some proprietary compression or if the hardware didn't have any convenient line out.

What do you all think?

update: I just found popcatcher which appears to be something close to the technology I'm looking for but they don't seem to make an actual hardware product. I've also found this wired article but it seems to cover portables like PoGo and not car stereos. TiVo, itself, will soon offer XM radio -- but, again, that's not in my car.

update2: Jackpot! Almost. "Two models will soon be available...."

Posted by asa at May 28, 2004 05:51 AM