Down goes radio
 

My Facebook status now

I have always been fascinated by broadcasting. I ran my college's radio station. But since there is an Internet, broadcasting over the air is no longer interesting. It's all over; radio is dead, and the sooner we stick a fork in it, the happier we'll all be.

as soon as internet connectivity comes to cars on a large scale, it will be over, but not until.

Yeah, I really rely on my car radio and I dont have satellite.

I ♥ my radio.

I almost never listen to the radio. Pandora, something like that; fine. Regular over the air radio--sucky music, endless car commercials, and worst of all--talk radio. And why would I want another monthly bill added to my list for non-free radio>?

meh

I disagree. Loads of people listen to radio and love it, not to mention being able to access the podcast of interviews that they missed when they were actually aired. For as long as I can remember, people I know have discussed some of the personalities on radio as if they were either friends, family or part of their circle of contacts. Radio can work in really nicely with Internet-the station can promote their internet site and the site can promote the station.

What about Talk Radio? And what about my 2002 Accord? I can play AM, FM, cassette tapes, or audio discs. No internet, no satellite, not even MP3s.

This is looking several moves ahead. But the trends have been starting for the last few years: broadcast radio's revenues started going into free fall.

I agree. But under the old way, you had to be listening when they were broadcasting, and you had to be in range of the broadcast, or you just plain missed it. Doesn't that suck? You have a friend or family member that you care about, and you have to make sure you're in your car in the morning, listening to that one thing, or you don't get your time with them.

This is what Mr Stern said on Thursday:

We have this situation where, in order for there to be a Howard Stern brand there had to be other brands: radio station brands, satellite radio brands, etc. because massive infrastructure had to be in place in order to broadcast to a large audience.

Think about it: for radio, you have tall towers, beaming out massive amounts of RF energy. Or you have to launch several satellites into space and hook up a complicated satellite receiver to cars. That's a lot of heavy lifting.

So, in order to get Mr Stern's show, you had to buy $150 of radio with a special antenna and special installation, or deals had to be cut with auto manufacturers to build it all in, and then you had to pay $14.95 a month. And if you were out of satellite range, say in EU or AUS, you couldn't get it at all. (except via piracy)

The infrastructure to get audio on the internet is tiny in comparison, even if you have a massive audience.

Anyone with a smartphone or audio player and an aux input jack already has everything they need. Notice that the first people to leave radio are the tech-heads and spendy people with smartphones, leaving premium advertisers with less audience. The second people to leave will be people with late-model cars. Pretty soon only poor people and old people will listen to terrestrial radio. Like AM before it, in ten years US FM will mostly be Spanish stations and Rush Limbaugh clones.

"The horseless carriage? It's a fad. It'll never catch on."

I think UT's right, unless there is some kind of crazy event that drives people away from computers and the internets, Everything will be web based.

... and owned by Comcast and Google

If radio goes away, and we ever have any sort of real large-scale emergency, we're all screwed.

The radio folks have already tried to introduce a plan to require radio receivers in all mobile music devices, with that as the "excuse".

Free public libraries threatened to kill the publishing industry.

"Video Killed the Radio Star". I know this must be true. I heard it on the radio in 1979. Howard Stern is dead. Just look at his face. He just does not know it.

I don't have a problem with radio as much as with the available music. Now, if you cut me I will bleed classic rock all over the place. But here's my problem: "Fly Like an Eagle" is a totally awesome song. It's somewhat less awesome after hearing it for the 30,000th time. And they ain't making classic rock no more, the artists are dying off, and the little new music from the great old acts still making music just ain't making it, for me anyway. And I just can't stand the vast majority of music less than ten years old. The last cd I bought was Kid Rock's "Rock n Roll Jesus". And only because it was on sale. I don't even bother to reset my presets on my stereo when the power goes out (the memory battery died about five years ago).

I love music and cannot imagine life without my radio/cdplayer.

Get ye to http://www.pandora.com if you are not already aboard. You'll find new or different music you like.

I find most of my music these days just by surfing Amazon and the iTunes store.

What happens when we cross this thread with the Net Neutrality thread? And then with the Congress has Lost Its Mind thread?

Please take the blue pill now.

I tried that once a while back, I may give it another try...Thanks for the tip.

Great, put it all in my car, distract the hell out of me, so I can forget little annoyances...










like fucking driving.:mad:

hmm, I don't really feel distracted by music while driving.

In fact, having music on your ipod or whatever I think would make for less distraction, as you have continuous music of your own choice without ads etc., so you're not constantly fiddling with the dials changing the station.

Like it or not though, all new cars will have more and more of this music and other technology to play with. They're coming out now with text blockers and stuff for teenagers.

Listening to music isn't a problem, except some music may cause you to drive faster or slower than normal. Listening to talk radio, you're mileage may vary.
But bringing the internet, with all it's distractions, is crazy.

oh, yeah, on that I agree. can't be posting on da cella when driving; no!

Howard and the Internet
 

UT is right.

The average (not smartphone) cell phone is now powerful enough and gets enough of a signal to carry decent stereo sound to a car. There are millions of iDevices, Android phones, Blackberries, and other vendors' devices that are capable of handling the signal. The security is good enough to handle streaming these days.

The other thing to remember is that Howard owns the rights to his back catalog. He has over 20 years to offer. If he could offer THAT on demand with an app, I would sign up immediately (not like I won't already since I do own a Sirius radio and subscribe to Howard TV). When I don't want to hear Sal & Richard's Latest Gay Stunt, Scott DePace is Superior and Conservative, or Ronnie Embarrasses Himself at Rick's Again, I want to be able to hear old bits like every Sam Kinison appearance, Butt Cheeks Fever, LoJackie, or any Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf bit.

Radio's been dead for years, except for sports, news, and religious programming. The Internet has finally gotten to the point where it can replace the radio in your car.

Howard really hasn't been that funny the past two or three years and relies too much on shitty writers like Benji, Sal, and Richard who rehash the same stuff, and he doesn't have Artie Lange waiting to self-destruct all the time anymore. However, he has over 20 years of the funniest radio ever to stream. If he offers that, he'll get millions of subscribers who want to hear those bits.

I hope that there's more to come from Howard, Fred, and Robin (and hopefully Bababooey, JD, Will, and a few others) on the Internet. I hope Scott DePace loses his job and gets stuck on the worst morning TV show possible, or gets stuck hawking his golf camera clamp at county fairs next to the freak shows.

I'm wagering that the entire archive will be available. Jeff Jarvis has seen Howard's technology back-end, and said the whole shebang is on SANs in an office outside of Sirius, and backed up at Howard's beach house. My theory is that Howard has known and been planning for this possibility for a long time. It may even be why the show hasn't been so entirely awesome -- harder to be motivated when the end is in sight and something more exciting is around the corner. He hinted at the Internet once in April! I would not be surprised to find out that the "renovations" at the Manhattan apartment were to put in a complete studio.

Howard has been at the forefront of technology for years. Having everything on redundant IBM (because he loves IBM technology and has for years...he does still run Lotus Notes and has kept Jeff Schick around for at least 20 years) SANs would be just like him. He had a Treo when the entire world had RAZR phones.

At this point, I would not be surprised if he was running fiber between those locations. He can afford it, and backing up 100TB takes a $1M+ tape drive setup (we have one at work - a Quantum ADIC with 36 drives) and a lot of fiber (we have that too). Business-class cable is still not good enough to handle that amount of data. I can fit 100TB in a 42U rack and have space left over, even with an EMC these days (we just did that for a project). You can fit a small EMC or IBM SAN and the supporting equipment in a small room.

I can imagine that they make Sal & Richard scan the dildos, since they like that stuff. Somehow I don't see Boy Gary doing that anymore.

I can also imagine that Howard encrypts all of it, probably with the Brocade switches.

and I bet the location in NJ is one of the datacenters there that the Wall Street firms also use. Howard is not one to skimp on what matters.

And, F Jackie!

xoB, it should be as easy as: you put your phone in a mount, you push an icon on the display, audio starts playing. At most you have to insert a 1/8" jack.

It should be a better user interface than the common car stereo is these days. The designers at Clarion want us to die in a fiery crash:

http://cellar.org/2010/clarion.jpg

That's seven buttons in a circle, which you can't identify by feel. The "menu" button will bring up a complicated display that you have to look at to operate. Then there are eight buttons along the bottom, which you can't identify by feel. There appears to be no pause button, or if there is, they've hidden it really well. From here it looks like if you want to stop playing something, you have to hit the middle button for longer than a second, turning the entire thing off.

I'm reading that putting your music on a flash drive and plugging it into a USB port in your car works really well. But how exactly does that work? Can you load music from iTunes onto a flash drive, does anyone know?

It depends on the format. If you bought it as MP3, just right click on what you want to copy and browse it in your file browser, windows explorer or whatever it is you use, and you can drag n drop it to a flash drive or sd card or not-Pod player.

If you bought it in Apple's restricted format, then you can only use an iPod I guess.

I was going to post a pic of a headsup display, but BMW has beat me to it, and ogne one further. In addition to heads up display they also have night vision. Probably left over first generation crap, but still cool:

No. You can get it to mp3, but it's a pain in the ass.

Make a playlist.
Burn it to disk.
Rip the disk to mp3 (which means you have to provide all the mp3 info)

hmm. does sound like a pita. what is the "mp3 info?"

The artist, album title, track titles. Window Media Player will usually find this for you automatically, but if it doesn't: while the disc is ripping, right-click and select "find album info" search their mega all-inclusive database, select your album, it will attach the correct titles to your rip job (both in the WMP library and in the directory where they are being written).

This is better than naming the files by hand because it actually writes the information on the tags, where they are read by players.

The thing is that when you burn a playlist from iTunes, what gets burned is probably a random list of tunes you like, not necessarily an image of some cd. So it's never going to be found in the freedb or the like.

Most good cd rippers will allow you to enter information in by hand for each of the tunes on a disk, but again, it's time consuming and not a lot of fun.

Not that it helps for your current collection, but I now recommend to people that they buy their tunes from amazon. They give you regular mp3s.

BTW, the radio in our 2009 Honda has a minijack. Use whatever mp3 player you like and set it to AUX. Zing 1 uses her ipod in it a lot.

I just ripped my entire CD collection as 320kbps MP3s (the most ubiquitous format). The whole point of getting the music off of the physical disc format was to improve accessability and portability. Nothing proprietary for me, thanks. No WMAs, no FLACs (I don't have Superman hearing). I want it to play on ANYTHING. I want it to play on a 10 year old DVD player.

Our Honda minivan has a 6-disc changer that reads MP3s, so even at 320kbps I can load up about 400 songs. Also, we have the minijack option, which I plan to implement as soon as I see a really cheap mp3 player run in the Fry's flyer.

Sadly, my 2002 Honda only plays audio discs. I do have a cassette slot that I could run one of those discman adapters in...

It is not tiny! It's huge!

But it's shared in a way that RF broadcasting has not been.

I also use the AUX option in my Honda CRV to play MP3s. I use my Blackberry, which of course is my MP3 player, and it also streams from Pandora.

I got my hubby an XM radio for Christmas, but essentially I get the same service for free with Pandora.

And yes, I agree with Pete, I buy MP3s from Amazon. I've always hated iTunes. I figured their scam out in the early days when I first got an MP3 player and got some free songs on, I think, a Coke bottlecap or something. It was a problem because I didn't have an iPod and wasn't about to shell out $200 for something I could buy for $30. I had to find a freeware app to convert the files, but after that they worked fine.