Ad: Save with State Farm® Insurance
ie8 fix

radio

Another candle alternative

Coolest Gadgets has posted another gadget for making things easier when the lights go out.

The Blackout Buddy for $30 from Ambient Weather is an AM/FM radio and LED light with clock that comes on when everything else goes out.

Like the lava lamp night-light, you keep it plugged into an electrical socket to stay charged. It then automatically comes on when the electricity turns off.

The Blackout Buddy can also be used as an alarm clock, and even has a headphone jack.

Personally, I like getting stuck using candles for an evening. But if you prefer flashlights over … Read more

A DVR for your radio

Radio stations are about to feel the same pain as the television stations scrambling to keep advertisers in the wake of commercial-skipping DVRs.

PopCatcher, a Stockholm-based company, has patented a technology that can automatically detect and record music from FM radio, AM radio, Internet radio or DAB radio (for our Scandinavian readers who were wondering).

The PopCatcher MusicDock MD-601 distinguishes between speech or commercials, and music. It records music played by its radio and stores each song as an MP3 file.

The MP3 player dock is a regular radio with built-in speakers. When you place the PopCatcher MP3 player in … Read more

FoxyTunes Planet gets music discovery right

The team behind the popular browser extension FoxyTunes is hard at work on a new mashup site that integrates the music controls of FoxyTunes with an aggregation tool to give you more information and media about your favorite musical artists and new discoveries.

Each FoxyTunes Planet artist page has several customizable widgets. There are Flickr photos, YouTube videos, albums for sale from Amazon, and even various Internet radio stations such as HypeMachine and Last.fm where you can listen to the band's other songs. If you're like me, you might be listening to a Shoutcast feed on iTunes … Read more

A radio right out of Spinal Tap

There are tons of retro-designed music players on the market, but they've almost become parodies of themselves with the same old jukebox and '20s-style radio cases. So we're thankful that Pure Digital has decided to break out of the box, figuratively and literally. It's created a digital radio that looks like a Marshall amp--including, as Crave UK points out, a volume knob that goes to 11 a la This Is Spinal Tap. Brilliant.

Find local stations (and unused frequencies) with Radio-Locator

Need to find info on anything radio related? Check out Radio-Locator. The site offers a searchable database of AM and FM radio stations around the U.S. (and the world, in fact). You can search by ZIP code (most useful) or state, or look up specific stations by their call letters. If you search by ZIP code, you'll get a list of all the stations that should be accessible in your area, along with distances and signal strengths and hyperdetailed information on the stations themselves (the owner's address and phone number, FCC license info, programming genre, transmitter location … Read more

Audiovox wants to one-up other XM satellite portables

Shhhhhh! Audiovox has been displaying the XM2Go/MP3 portable in its copious CES 2007 booth, but the company isn't quite ready to discuss details. Scheduled for a late-summer release, the X2G100B will offer a similar feature set as other XM/MP3 portables such as the Delphi SkyFi3--live and recorded XM playback, MP3 playback, storage, and so on--but company execs say they are taking some time to make sure they can equip the player with enough cool features to really differentiate it from other XM/MP3 portables.

It will likely have at least enough memory to store up to 50 … Read more

Eton adds iPod and Sirius for personalized clock radio

Add Eton to the growing list of manufacturers such as iHome and DLO adding iPod to a clock radio so that you can wake up to your own music. But the company has gone one step further and added Sirius satellite radio connectivity to its new Sound 101 AM/FM clock radio. Unfortunately, the iPod doesn't dock on the Sound 101 (April, $150), but jacks in via a separate charging dock, which could be an ungainly arrangement on a small night table. You also have to add your own Sirius receiver.

A second Eton expandable alarm clock, the Sound … Read more

Pioneer's A/V receiver handles XM and Sirius all-in-one

The big surprise at CES 2007 has been the dearth of major announcements about new home-audio products. Receivers with HDMI 1.3 and built-in decoding for next-gen lossless audio formats are nowhere to be seen. But at least one receiver has brought something new to the table: Pioneer's VSX-1017TXV is the first model we've seen that offers built-in compatibility with both XM and Sirius satellite radio services. (In fact, it's one of three receivers in Pioneer's 2007 line that offers the dual-satellite option.)

As evidenced by the model number, the 1017TXV is just an evolutionary upgrade … Read more