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March 1, 2005
radioSHARK Review
So this weekend my curiousity got the best of me and I trekked to the Apple Store at Lenox Mall to buy a radioSHARK (please forgive the precious capitalization, but that's how they do it). For those who haven't seen one before, the radioSHARK looks like a white shark fin with blue "gills" on the side and a USB connector. You plug it into your PC or Mac, install the software and you can listen to the radio on your computer.
Not that sexy by itself (there have been devices that do this before -- wow, check out that vomitous interface!), but what the radioSHARK brings to the table that's pretty cool is the ability to schedule recordings of radio broadcasts and pause live radio, much in the way you can with TiVo. The recorded programs get shimmed to your media player of choice (as long as you like iTunes on the Mac or Windows Media Player on the PC) and dumped into whatever directory you want. Of course, they're un-DRM'ed files, so you can always burn an audio CD.
The device is certainly nice looking, glowing blue when it's just hanging out and red when it's recording. It's completely USB-powered, so there's no AC adapter, which is also nice. Reception in my lower-level office is fine, albeit with a constant FMmy static in the background. It got considerably better when I plugged in a pair of headphones in the device's headphone jack, which doubles as an antenna. For voice programming in particular, it's great; for music, it sounds about like any other radio, which is only so-so.
The software is fine, though the interface is a little goofy on this one too. It's kind of a hybrid of OS X and Windows on both platforms (I'm running it on Windows) and they both seem pretty much identical. Scheduling recordings is fairly simple, though there are no program guides like TiVo -- you have to specify by day-and-date. Maybe one day.
Audio files can be captured to either uncompressed AIFF or compressed AAC on the Mac or uncompressed WAV or compressed WMA on Windows. That's kind of annoying since, if you're on a PC and want to use an iPod, you have to convert the files before you can copy them (the iPod doesn't support WMA). It's not a big deal, but a surprising oversight. Hopefully they'll support AAC and iTunes on the Windows side soon, or, better yet, one of the Media Center guys will write a plugin.
The only platform-specific feature I've found is that the Windows version of the software will let you network broadcast a recording while it's in progress -- so if you know that "Fresh Air" is on and you're not at a radio, you can use Windows Media Player to stream it from the machine hosting the radioSHARK. It's a neat trick, but not all that useful. Better would be if it could stream constantly.
In the end, though, the device does what it claims to do and it looks pretty spiffy doing it. It's not cheap ($69 at the Apple Store, $55 from Amazon for those who don't demand immediate grat), but it's not outrageous either. It was really nice last night listening to yesterday afternoon's "Fresh Air" at 10 p.m. while I played some MLB 2k5 on the Xbox and, better still, I don't have to miss "Car Talk," "The Infinite Mind" or "This American Life" anymore (or drop $3 an episode on Audible when I'm taking a car trip). If you like radio, especially talk radio, this is a pretty cool gadget.
Posted by Lee Clontz at March 1, 2005 2:18 PM