Monday, February 28, 2005

Sonus 1XT DAB radio with voice navigation. Sonus 1XT DAB radio with voice navigation. Those of us not living in the U.K. are seriously behind when it comes to radio. Sure, we’ve got satellite radio in the U.S. But the Brits have DAB — digital audio broadcasts that are free over the air as long as you’ve got a DAB receiver (America’s answer to DAB, HD radio, has a long way to go before it even comes close to DAB in terms of reach). This has led to something of an explosion in DAB receivers, many with Tivo-like time-shifting features built-in. We particularly like the units from Pure, which have a sort of retro-Henry Kloss look to them, but still pack in a range of modern features. One that’s really intriguing is the Sonus 1XT, which includes voice navigation. As you scroll through stations on the dial, a gender-selectable voice prompt tells you what station you’ve reached. Sure, digital tuning and presets make this less useful than it might have been a few years ago, but we like the idea of being able to scroll and randomly find a station we might like, without having to wait for a station break to find out where we are. Of course, since we’re in the U.S., we can’t actually check this out, but we hope the upcoming crop of HD radios includes similar functions. [Engadget] 9:25:04 PM     MPIO's 2005 lineup, pt.1: The MPIO-1, MPIO-2, and MPIO HD-400, HD-500. Up-and-coming company MPIO must be doing something right, because they’re hitting back with a vengeance today, no less than ten new leaked players. Round one: the MPIO-1 and MPIO-2 are flash players that will range in sizes from 128MB to 1GB, and will play back MP3, DRMed WMA, ASF, and OGG Vorbis, and feature FM, line-input, and USB-On-The-Go (2.0). The MPIO-1 will feature a 65k color OLED screen, the MPIO-2 will feature a larger 1.8-inch color TFT. And from the looks of things, they ain’t too shabby in the design department, and are certainly small enough: the MPIO-1 is a rather impressive 2.1 x 1.2 x 0.57-incher. The followups to their moderately successful HD-200 and HD-300 players, the HDD-400 and HDD-500 are also both drive based—the HDD-400 swings the 1-inch drive angle, in either 5 or 8GB flavors, and has a 1.8-inch color LCD, and USB 2.0. The HDD-500 will come in either 20 or 40GB varieties, and will also feature a color LCD and USB-On-The-Go. Both players will play back MP3, DRMed WMA, ASF, and OGG Vorbis, as well as having FM tuners. Please continue to excuse the godawful watermarking. [Via DAPreview] [Engadget] 9:17:38 PM     Official: Wi-Fi on Airplanes Not Lies. So who else heard about internet on airplanes and said, "Golly, I can't wait to not afford that!" A person who calls hirself 'Alexander,'—the bishonen anime hermaphrodite avatar isn't giving me much to go on, although who are we to talk?—tried out the Boeing Connexion broadband service on a flight from Frankfurt and varified that it does actually work, then went on to talk about the battery life on their Axim X50. Awesome, glad to know it actually works and the Lufthansa stewards don't just come by and ink a big LOADING on your newspaper or something, but maybe next time you could benchmark it and tell us how fast it was. Also, do that other idea, where you were going to test Skype—that would almost make the $30 fee worth it. Alex speaking from Flight LH 432 [MobileRead] [Gizmodo] 5:27:55 PM

Sunday, February 27, 2005

The latest Daily Podcast feed is up.  It contains a poem, discussion on jumping the shark, information about NY Hotel Bars, Podcast safe music from Jersey and more.  So go over to my new audioblog experiment, "The Daily Podcast Feed" and listen to some of the podcasts in it! All of the tools (GigaDial, Blogger, FeedBurner, WebJay, Smoothouse Webjay wizard, Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer ) I am using in my latest audioblog experiment are free and available right now on the web.  That fact opens the potential for a group of pioneer podcast feed producers to evolve using a set of open free tools.  Below is a list of descriptions of some of the tools I use to create "The Daily Podcast Feed": GigaDial  GigaDial.net is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters. Outputs RSS 2.0 XML feeds. Blogger  Free blogging authoring software.  Enables  the distribution of Podcast feeds through the embeding of audio players and links to RSS 2.0 feeds using the weblog platformy.  Outputs an ATOM XML feed that can be inputted to other services such as FeedBurner. FeedBurner  Can converts a ATOM feed to RSS 2.0 XML file.  Using it's SmartCast feature, FeedBurner will take the first anchor (<a>) tag that it finds in your posting content and convert the linked URL into an RSS 2.0 <enclosure>.  Is the case of Audioblogging 2.0, the RSS 2.0 enclosure file type is also a RSS 2.0 file.  Feedburner turns the feed item into content that future audioblogging 2.0/podcasting clients can potentially use to produce "show channels". WebJay  Mother of all music playlist generators.  It allows you to take a RSS 2.0 file with mp3 enclosures and convert it to a XSPF playlist to feed into Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer. Smoothouse Webjay wizard  Assists in the generation of the correct HTML for linking/embedding a Webjay playlist in Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer. Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer XSPF Web Music Player is a flash-based web application that uses xspf playlist format to play mp3 songs. XSPF is the XML Shareable Playlist Format. The software is written in Actionscript 2. Player can be embedded into a weblog post using weblog authoring software like Blogger. Many of the tools above contain other features that do a lot more then the features I described.  My explanations  focus on the features used for creating "The Daily Podcast Feed" and what I call Audioblogging 2.0. 1:16:41 AM

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