DJALCHEMI

Recording online radio vs. podcasts

In the last year or two, the concept of martini media — 'anytime, anyplace, anywhere' access to whatever audio and video you feel like — has shifted from being a vision of a possible future to being an almost taken-for-granted inevitability. The speed with which it comes about will be slowed by the friction of dealing with rights-holders' concerns (some valid, some less so), but momentum will nevertheless bring it about in the end.

Hence I've not really been keeping up with my collection of harbingers of martini media; they are too many and various these days. What brings me back is another radio-related technology: the Griffin iFill software, which fills up your mp3 player with recordings from online radio stations. (Last year, Griffin produced the hardware-based radio SHARK, which provides some of the same functions for AM and FM radio.)

I find there's something slightly anaemic about podcasts in the way they provide a radio-substitute experience in pre-packaged bottles. The stream of live radio is more dynamic, more chaotic, and correspondingly more refreshing. The act of recording off the radio puts the listener in charge of how audio is packaged, instead of the producer.

What would make recording online radio even more listener-driven would be having some RSS-subscription-type metdata associated with the programmes, or agent-based scanning of the programme metadata, so that you could set your recorder to look out for interviews or documentaries on your favourite subjects/artists and record them for you.

This goes back to what I've written before about future models for discovering and listening to music, which combine dynamic content with control (including the personalisation that that implies).