© 2005 Abe Brody and Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 27, no. 4, July-August 2005, pp. 14-16.
When Steve Jobs prattled on about the “digital lifestyle” several years ago at Macworld, most of the people in the audience were tolerant. They had no idea what he was talking about, yet listened politely so he’d get on with his keynote and start talking about new software and hardware. But at least one group in the audience was listening: designers from Griffin Technology. They not only figured out what “digital lifestyle” meant, but they also adopted Apple’s odd naming convention of mixed-case proper product names when they introduced the radio SHARK.
Great White Radio Recorder
radio SHARK is a combination of whimsy and function. The unit itself is shaped like a shark fin, for no good reason at all aside from the fact that it looks cool (Figure 1). It also has cool glowing lights on the side of the fin. A USB cable allows you to attach the fin to a 400 MHz G3 or better Mac running Mac OS X 10.2.8 or higher; the fin is powered by the computer over the USB cable. Devotees of The Dark Side can also connect it to a 400 MHz or better Windows XP machine. Aside from the fin, which serves as radio antennae and receiver, the rest of the radio SHARK is pure software.
And what can you do with this software? You can use it to:
- Tune the radio SHARK to any AM (530 to 1710 kHz) station;
- Tune the radio SHARK to any FM (87.5 to 108.0 MHz) station;
- Listen to live radio through the speakers on your computer;
- Record any AM or FM broadcast in real time, or according to a schedule;
- “Pause” a live radio broadcast and return right where you left off;
- Set presets for favorite radio stations;
- Transfer recorded broadcasts to iTunes, or to an iPod for replay away from your Mac.
Noted computer technology reviewer Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal called the radio SHARK “TiVo for your radio.”
The best way to show you how radio SHARK works is through pictures of the software in action. In Figure 2, you see the basic interface for radio SHARK. There are six main buttons: Band (for switching between AM and FM), Seek (to find a strong signal automatically), Rec (for recording), Sched (for scheduling), EQ (for equalizing), and TS (for time-shifting). Additionally, there is a tuning slider, a volume slider, and a presets menu.
Figure 3 shows what happens when the preset menu is selected. Once you find a station you want to keep, you can add to it to the list of stations that pop up on the main screen. You can remove unwanted stations with equal ease. The equalizer (Figure 4) allows you to move sliders to adjust the audio spectrum to your preferences for different types of audio. When things are the way you want it, you save its setting and give it a name.
The scheduling window (Figure 5) lets you add programs and schedule them any way you want to. If you want to add a schedule, press the Add button, and you ‘ll get a new window (Figure 6) where you can fill in the details. Much like a VCR, you can set the time, date, number of repeats of the show, and can also give names to the recordings.
Within the scheduling window, pressing Settings allows you to set the sampling rate in kilobits per second (kbps) and encoding quality (Figure 7). You can record the audio quality at a much higher rate of sampling than that used by the iTunes Music Store and its competitors. A good sampling rate for most MPEG3 files is 192 kbps, which sounds very similar to the 128 kbps and AAC encoding used on Apple’s iTunes store.
Once you are done editing your selected recordings, they will appear in the scheduled portion of the schedule window (Figure 5), and if you toggle to the recorded section (Figure 8), you can see the recordings already made. The recorded view also acts much like an iTunes playlist in that it has a search field where you can type the name of the recorded radio show and it will limit the listings to those that match the search. You can also add songs from your iTunes music library to play alongside the recorded AM/FM songs by pressing the Add button.
The radio SHARK preferences panel (Figure 9) gives the listener control over many things that are only peripheral to recording audio. The “General” tab controls the on-screen color appearances of the software, turning the lights on the “fin” on or off, the sort order for radio presets and the name of the radio SHARK playlist. The time shift preferences, provide Tivo-like control over how much live audio is stored, which in turn allows you to pause, rewind and skip a “live” broadcast. Other preferences control settings for instant recording, the default directory for recordings and how the radio SHARK scans for radio stations.
Throw in the cool blue lights and the shark fin shape, and the radio SHARK may be the most configurable radio you’ve ever used. radio SHARK recordings stored in the iTunes library can be played and manipulated just like any other iTunes file. And, of course, once in the iTunes library, any recording can be transferred to an iPod, bringing Steve Jobs’ “digital lifestyle” to old fashioned radio. radio SHARK, $69.99, Griffin Technology http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/