Worth Reading?
Word on the street is HD Radio is the new wave, imaging satellite radio quality but add some ads and lower the price to $0.00 per month. Well with HD Radio people are finally getting a way to revolutionize the way we listen to the normal radio, including the ability to tag a song for later purchase.
Up till now the best you could do for figuring out a song title/artist is either a Google search with the part of the lyrics you remember and hope you find something, or use one of the services where you record a portion of the song or use your phone and the service tries to recognize it for you. Well that is all changing thanks to HD Radio where they are able to transmit not only the song but all the metadata for it OTA.
Well apparently JBL and Polk’s next HD radios are going to capitalize on this neat function and make it so you can tag songs for later purchase in iTunes when you hear them. the process sounds a little more complicated than it should be. It requires you to hear the song on the HD radio, then tag it, then connect your iPod or presumably iPhone, and sync it with the radio and then sync the iDevice with your iTunes library and it will provide a list.
The first device will be Polk’s I-Sonic Entertainment System 2 which will be available in October for an OMFG! $499! Although it is from Polk, and if you have never heard the sound that comes out of any of their equipment, I can personally assure you that chances are real good that this thing will be well worth it.
HD Radios to allow tagging for later iTunes purchase [via TUAW]
What’s the point to HD Radio/iPod tagging, as it is just a stepping-stone to Internet Radio tagging via WiFi/WiMAX. Besides, consumers have shunned HD Radio:
http://hdradiofarce.blogspot.com/
I don’t know that consumers have shunned HD radio. The stereo equipment manufacturers have, or at least are inching into the new technology with glacial slowness. Either the manufacturers or music companies or both are terrified of people recording digital copies of the music for free.
Try to find HD radio-ready stereo receivers. Most OEMs like Denon and Pioneer have installed the necessary chips in only their highest-end receivers, and have done NOTHING to promote the feature. If the OEMs list HD radio capability, it’s buried under a blizzard of acronyms for movie-related codecs and power specifications.
As for devices like the Polk i-Sonic listed above–the bedside/tabletop standalone machines–most of them are glorified clock radios with the sonic limitations to boot.
And let’s get down the real crunchiness: how many of these HD-ready devices provide digital audio-out connections, so that you can actually record HD radio in its original CD-quality sound?
Damn few. Most of us aren’t messing around with peer-to-peer networks to download free music…but many of us would love to get free music. If you had an HD radio-ready rig that you could connect to a computer or hard drive, you’d have a 24/7 source of high quality recordable music.
The HD radio rollout has been hobbled, even crippled, by the fear of recordable CD-quality music with no DRM. As it is, I’m not sure how wonderful HD radio is gonna be, because the idiots who program the pablum on FM radio will control the programming on these new stations anyway.
Wow, I guess that figures since iPods are the kings of the MP3 world… ;-)
And iTunes is just the key product of the iPod.