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April 28, 2005
Radio of the Sub-Genius?
The tape deck in my car died recently, so I've started listening to the radio again. I was bouncing back and forth between KMFA (classical music) and KGSR (eclectic rock w/ an Austin twist) when I discovered "Bob-FM" at 103.5 MHz.
At first it was really pretty cool. The premise, which they keep telling us over and over, is that this is Bob's radio station, and we're just listening to Bob's massive CD collection which spans the 60's through today. I liked the idea of that. It's similar to what I'd do if I ran a radio station. It wouldn't be Metal or Rap or Top-40. It would just be good music that Dan liked.
My tapes were like that, just collections from CD's, and I had mixed together about twelve hours worth of music ranging from Queen and the Eagles to Tori Amos and the Alan Parson's Project. I probably could have doubled that if I'd both taken the time and was willing to accept the songs that I just sorta liked. People who rode with me on trips would comment, "Damn, this is a really good tape." If I had access to the budget and the time to search for the music (let's leave RIAA vs. Napster out of it for the moment), I could probably rack up 100 hours of pure music. [Reality check: consider the top 40 songs from 40 years to get 1600 songs... 3.5 minutes each yields about 93 hours.] That's over four days. Toss in the news reports, some commercials, a minimum of DJ chat to remind you that yes, that really was the Turtles singing "Happy Together". That would bring you up to five or six days. Maybe toss in a little extra of the more recent stuff (say, the last 3 years), and you should be able to get up to about a week. Yep, you could listen to a radio station 24/7 for a week without hearing a repeat.
Well, that's not what Bob-FM is. The honeymoon lasted about two days of intermittent driving before I heard my first repeat, some psuedo-Country piece about "living like you were dying". And then more repeats, which then repeated. In a couple of weeks, I've found about ten or fifteen songs on there that I keep hearing again and again. Now, there IS a good mix of older stuff that breaks up the monotony, but I'd bet it's still about 60% or 70% Top-40 being repeated over and over.
Maybe I should cut Bob some slack. Well, maybe I would if he played Eurythmics more than Backstreet Boys.
In the meantime, I'm going to start looking for my dream car stero unit: an MP3 player that would read songs from a dual-layer DVD. At 8.5GB, I could store 140+ hours of music, almost six days worth. It really would be my own little radio station: KDAN. Considering that I don't drive very much, it would last for months. Heh, imagine the shuffle on that taking you from bagpipes to the Village People and then off to Sarah McLachlan.
Mmmmmm.... shuffle....
Reviews by Dan at April 28, 2005 10:31 PM
Comments
Report back if you find anything out on the DVD mp3 player thing. I get the Crutchfield catalog, and they, and everyone else, seem mysteriously dismissive of the question of DVD/mp3 players. Their catalog listing just shows CD/DVD/mp3, as if each of those three features were totally orthogonal to the others.
I have never seen anyone anywhere ever advertise a car unit that could play MP3's encoded on a DVD-UDF file system.
Nor have I seen any DVD players with mp3 support that could handle that sort of thing. I know my Sony can't..
Posted by: Jonathan Abbey at April 29, 2005 10:10 AM