Hi,
I had a thought while driving home tonight and listening to my empeg and so I am tabling this idea here to 'run it up the flag pole' to see if other might find it useful.

My idea/suggestion is this:

When in Player (or Aux mode too I guess), whenever the Emepg clock reaches 5 or 6 seconds before the hour (on the local clock), could it output some 'time pips' like the BBC does leading into the top of each hour?

The thought behind this is, often while driving in my car I want to catch the local news on the radio - but I often forget to stop listening and then switch to the tuner on the Empeg (or tuner in the head unit) to catch the news.

The time pips would remind me of the 'top of the hour' and then I could switch to my radio station (manually) or simply ignore it and carry on listening - 5 seconds of pips over your music is minimal disruption and the chance of it disturbing your music (if listening while in the car is 24 times a day).

This would be enable-able via config.ini and/or the Hijack options menu (if in the kernel), or via a Userland App if in the Userland space.

Questions are:

1. How difficult would it be to do this?

I would probably suggest a real 6 seconds long WAV file of some real "time pips" is recorded and then this is mixed/played back into the output audio stream (over the currently playing music) at the right time - I think someone was talking about doing something similar for spoken directions already - this is similar. A six second WAV file would be under 1MB

2. Would anyone else find this feature useful?

3. Is it better implemented as a Userland app?

This sounds like a rather trivial feature for an aspiring userland developer to tackle. One could even be "fancy" and bind into the Hijack menu system from userland for the "enable/disable/interval" settings.

Now, while I could have stuck it into Hijack in about the same time it's taking to write this message, there are now growing numbers of complaints that the Hijack menu is becoming "too large" (not sure I understand how it can be "too large", though -- spinning the knob is very fast, and the menu "remembers" it's current location for car/home use).

..

For what it's worth, I have an alarm clock project on my plate right now. I'd say 30% of it is worked out. Adding some kind of time blips on the hour/half hour/quarter hour would probably not be too difficult. I will consider adding this feature to that project.

This definitely belongs in a user app.

Is it possible to make the menu "user select". Then users can customize the menu with the functions they feel are important to them. It would be ashame to lose small conviniences due to the menu being to big.

Or... how about Hijack actually switching over to Tuner (or Aux) when the designated time(s) arrive?

Users can already customize the menu in config.ini:

[hijack]

menu_remove=Knob Rotate Redefinition

menu_remove=Show Flash Savearea

But no need to do this for the "Home/Work Location" menu entry,
because in v182 it will only be displayed when needed,
when you have one or more ";@HOME" or ";@WORK" lines in config.ini.

Cheers

-ml

yn0t_: Could be a excellent add-on to your alarm clock idea then, while it would be nice to have a tuner switch over mode, for now time-pips on the hour is all I want.


beaker: Yeah I thought about that idea origianlly, but for now, after some thought, some time pips to remind me to switch over would be sufficient - as I may have just heard the news (from some other source) or maybe I don't want the news and therefore a forced switch would be not so useful.

My original idea of the pips was simply to remind me, "hey its ? O'clock - if you want the news switch to tuner mode now, otherwise keep listening" and my pips will stop soon.

OK, that's cool. Didn't know whether you'd thought of it that's all. If Mark can implement this I'm sure he could put an option in the Hijack menu or config.ini to choose what action you require to be performed at the specified time (ie pips or switch source).

How about taking the idea to the "Next Level"(tm)!

First step: configuration includes beep frequency (hour, half hour, 15m)

Second step: Set alarm time and have different beep at alarm time (perhaps like a watch alarm: beep for several seconds or until any button is pressed).

Third step: Have alarm play an mp3 alarm file.

Fourth step: Make the alarm be a playlist rather than an mp3. This allows you to have a playlist of alarm tones and select either random or sequential so you can have variety in your alarm if you so desire.

Fifth step: Select whether you want the alarm to start your playlist or switch to the tuner and tune to a station.

Sixth step: Allow multiple alarms, each with its own action.

Seventh step: Allow the player to record the radio when the alarm goes off (is that possible?)

Eight step: Turn the empeg into a TiVo.

Ok, so that last one's a big step

Actually the second last idea is also a big step [record the radio].

The empeg can't do that - its a playback [only] device.

The other ideas are all worthy, but I don't need another alarm clock - I've got one,
all I want is a subtle but hard to confuse signal that its the top of the hour.

The time pips are a good and familiar [& not so intrusive] way to do this - I want it to stop by itself after a 5 seconds like the timepips do without needing any user interaction.

I agree however, for a generic count up/down timer, then yes turning off the beep manually is required.

>The empeg can't do that - its a playback [only] device.

I'm not so sure about that myth.. The visuals have to sample the sound from somewhere, and if it's a good enough A/D conversion, we can record it to disk for eventual playback.

-ml

But does the unit have enough CPU to do realtime compression of the WAV data that goes to the speakers.

Richard Lovejoys voladj hack shows you can get at the PCM/WAV data - in theoiry you could hook the data there as well and compress it on the fly.

Big question would be where to save it? Create some fids on the (rwm) mounted filesystem somewhere?

I'm not so sure about that myth.. The visuals have to sample the sound from somewhere, and if it's a good enough A/D conversion, we can record it to disk for eventual playback.



Hugo posted about this a while ago. The deal is not that we couldn't record it... That is possible, and would be at full quality. The problem is that you wouldn't be able to do anything else. Therefore, you could record the stream if you were listening to it, but you couldn't record from the tuner while listening to an mp3. So, if you wanted to record a program, you could... but it would be in a vcr type of method, rather than a TiVo...

Right Synergy! We have been on this topic before. We could come up with a way to record, and even jump back to hear what you'd recorded, but you would be lacking a few elements of what ReplayTV/TiVO owners have become accustomed to-- the ability to jump back to live (ie. to continue recording new signal while the old recorded one is being listened to).

So IF we did come up with a way to record the tuner stream, we'd still be out of luck for some of the really cool aspects of the PVR-land toys.

See this link here for more on this topic.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all behind this effort and perhaps we've got a momentum now given all the fresh blood in the group to get something shaking here.

Best regards,
Tim

Right. This has even been a FAQ entry for a while.

Space shouldn't be a problem. For those of use with only one drive (most of us, right?) we could add a second drive (maybe only 5 or 10 Gig) format it ext2fs and mount it for use as a recording repository.

You'd be able to use this in conjunction with a CD player on the aux-in to "rip" CDs. But I doubt many of us would consider that a practical application... You'd get no CDDB info, you woulnd't be able (without a lot more research) to assign your new acquisitions fids and add them to existing playlists. But for recording radio, I wouldn't see those as major issues.

Naming files could be done by XDS info (the tuner I can't buy provides XDS, right?) or at least the station frequency and the recording date & time. E.g. 92.7 - 02-02-05 - 22:32.mp3

You'd have to use hijack to play these back since they'd be regular ext2fs files, not fids.

However, the part about not having enough CPU power to compress and playback at the same time makes it rather unattractive.

The other drawback I see is that what makes a TiVo functional is that it's on 24x7 to record shows when you're not able to watch (sleep and work have been known to cause viewing disruption). If the only time your empeg is on is when you're in the car, then why not just listen to the radio in real-time?

I can see one potential use that sounds like it might be feasible to impliment: the ability to "press record" while listening to the radio. Then you can save what you're listening to for later playback. It's very TiVo like, but I think it would be a more practical and desirable use of the empeg.

After having recorded several segments off the radio, you can then HTTP to your empeg, download your saved radio .mp3 files and upload them as fids with emplode. Then you can add them to normal playlists instead of having to use the hijack menu option to playback radio recordings.

I guess people aren't feeling up to searching through some of the older threads that touched on these topics. Either that or they're just forgetting about the quality issues. The limitations are briefly mentioned in the FAQ link above. Specifics can be found in older threads.

The concept also goes against my whole philosophy with the empeg. One of the important points of that philosophy is to avoid any and all radio usage. It sucks. XM, AM FM. It's all still radio. Am I one of the only people that's not excited about Digital Radio? So instead of analog crap, we have digital crap. Great.

I'm all into getting low-quality voice recording working at some point however. This can even be buffered to RAM to prevent long periods of RW mounting. This can be accompanied with the ability to tag the date/time onto the note and maybe a few characters using some type of character-scrolling input.

Bruno

You're not the only one. Of of the only reasons to listen to the radio is to hear local information, and satellite radio (digital or not) removes that reason. Plus you have to pay for it?!?

I'll admit it too, I just don't get XM (more accurately, I won't get XM)--you mean pay-radio for the car?!? Puh-leaze.

I really have no value in trying to capture unlabled music for future playback, but I have great value in being able to capture talk shows and news broadcasts to enable timeshifting them for, say, during a commute (would that I had one right now... ).

That would be pretty sweet though if while you're listening to the radio, you could press a button that would start recording to a file...

In reply to:

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The concept also goes against my whole philosophy with the empeg. One of the important points of that philosophy is to avoid any and all radio usage.

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Then I take it that you didn't buy a tuner module?

The point isn't to avoid the radio. It kinda loses something when you're listening to news, weather & traffic info that you've archived as .mp3s on your empeg.

It's getting a little off-topic, but there certainly is a market for XM. So you have to pay to listen to music without commercials... big deal. We've all paid a lot more to do the same. Granted, the difference is that we have control whereas XM listeners don't, but not everyone can afford an empeg (which is why they're no longer made).

I don't see a big demand for voice recording (but then I haven't taken a survey, so I could be wrong) What would you do? Talk to your empeg so you can hear your own voice later? If I really wanted to do that, I'd use my PC and upload the mp3. But the dire need to save the sound of your voice for later while in the car? I guess I just don't get it.

I know for sure that if I'd had a record button on my empeg on 9/11, I would have used it to record the radio broadcasts.

Voice recording is so I dont' have to dig a voice recorder out of my backpack while driving. I have some pretty incredible ideas while driving (it's one of two or three places/times I do my best brainstorming )

Bruno