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Air-TiVo?

Allan Englehardt sent me a link to a new product, the Bug, which is essentially a TiVo for Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB). Allan’s notes on it are here. The basic premise of it is that DAB is just transmission of a digital data stream, so there’s no reason you can’t put a hard drive in the radio (or just a bunch of RAM) and give it the radio a buffer, so you can pause the broadcast. Pretty nifty.

Would it be possible to extend this a bit? How are songs encoded on a digital audio broadcast? Are song titles in the header? Would it be possible to combine the technologies in the Bug with a frequency scanner and create a sort of super Air-TiVo, that scans the airwaves for songs you’re interested in, and saves them when they’re played? Could that be taken a bit further, and combined with Bluetooth, 802.11, or another short-range radio protocol to make a wireless P2P system, in the spirit of the Bass Station, combined with BlueWalk? How many lawyers would the RIAA throw on this grenade, I wonder?

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