171–180 of 329 posts
Apple isn't activating it because it "might undermine Beats One"? Oh give me a break. You can stream just about any FM station you want with apps like TuneIn Radio.
Far, far more people are more familiar with FM radio than TuneIn.
I just bought an internet radio for my stereo (yes, I'm that old, I have a stereo). I was surprised to discover it also had a wire in the box that turned out to be an FM antenna. I thought with internet radio, who needs an FM tuner? (all the local stations have streaming URLs) Turns out I actually like it. It's handy when the internet fails, or when you're nearing data caps, or just want to run it all day without int…
I'm using a HiFiBerry DAC (https://www.hifiberry.com/dacplus) as the built-in analogue audio on the Pi is abysmal. Then MPD (https://www.musicpd.org) for the back-end and ympd (https://www.ympd.org) for a web UI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's strange to me to read a positive comment about terrestrial radio broadcast amid so many complaints about ad blocking on the web. I stopped listening to radio many years ago and now I have an irrational resentment when I hear car stereos blasting pointless, noisy ads at traffic stops. I always wonder what allows people to mentally tune them out rather than decreasing the volume until music resumes. This is in no…
It really depends what country you're in. In the UK, by far the most-listened-to FM stations are from the BBC, which are of course ad-free. Radio 1 (for younger people) and Radio 6 (for less-young people) are great places to listen to new music. And you can stream them over the web, for free, even if you're not British: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firstly, why is the choice between no function or a crappy function? Why would every FM radio app necessarily be crappy? Secondly, why would it be useless when millions of people still listen to FM radio? In the UK for example, according to RAJAR (the UK radio body) 56% of radio listeners use FM compared to DAB or internet, which is around 26 million people. Thirdly, why does the hardware have an FM receiver at all i…
Making it good would make it more expensive than the returns you can expect. If it is possible to make it good, as the antenna is largely out of control. Fm is not useless, but bad Fm is. The third question is silly. Who's side are you arguing? The chip is there because it's more expensive not to have it. It's not like Apple adds Fm so they can laugh at the feature you almost had. It won't allow you to listen To BBC.…
Like a lot of others on this thread, in 2005, I had a tiny Nokia 6610 that let me do exactly that.
Having read about the chip, I can understand why it's there, and I can also understand the probable tradeoffs involved that have lead to the decision not to enable it. But I am still surprised and a little disappointed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question: Why? I don't understand why people inherently dislike Javascript (aside from, y'know, creepy ad networks).
Because we want the information to be free. If the web server is serving a document, you can do all sorts of stuff with it - you can index it, you can transform it, you can save it for later. If the web server is serving a DRM-ed program, that loads the human-viewable data over non-standard interfaces, all that breaks. Only humans in front of the web browser will be able to see the data. Or sufficiently dedicated peo…
Seems to cover the intent of things quite nicely :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, nearly all FM stations are available on the iPhone. Carriers haven't blocked it. Apple hasn't blocked it. They are there.[1] The entire premise of the article is false. [1] http://www.igeeksblog.com/best-radio-apps-for-iphone-and-ipa...
"Apps" -- that means streaming data. The point of the article is that FM would work when cellular signals won't. The entire internet is available except when it's not. This article is about receiving FM signals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine a world where all content is loaded over XHRs and the DOM serves only to load Javascript. This is becoming an increasingly prevalent pattern. I really miss the document-oriented web of the late 90's / early 00's.
Honest question: Why? I don't understand why people inherently dislike Javascript (aside from, y'know, creepy ad networks).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See https://play.google.com/store/search?q=fm%20radio&c=apps
All of those apps are not actually FM radio apps - Android does not have a standard API for accessing FM radio. The apps you linked are actually just misleadingly named Internet radio players that only play from stations that also broadcast over FM. Any phone which has FM radio will only be able to access it through an app distributed with the phone. Apparently Sony-Ericsson have some phones which have such a thing?…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firstly, why is the choice between no function or a crappy function? Why would every FM radio app necessarily be crappy? Secondly, why would it be useless when millions of people still listen to FM radio? In the UK for example, according to RAJAR (the UK radio body) 56% of radio listeners use FM compared to DAB or internet, which is around 26 million people. Thirdly, why does the hardware have an FM receiver at all i…
> Firstly, why is the choice between no function or a crappy function? Why would every FM radio app necessarily be crappy? FM antenna has to be quite big no? My old Cowon media player needed to have the headphones plugged in in order to use the FM function. That would mean that people with Bluetooth headphones (an ever increasing number) are out of luck. > Thirdly, why does the hardware have an FM receiver at all if…
No. Here's some food for thought: The wavelengths used for cellular communications in the order of about 0.3m to 0.4m for a lambda/2 dipole that would be an antenna length of 0.15m to 0.2m, which is quite larger than your typical phone.
There's no rubber hose dangling out of modern phones (it used to, 20 years ago), so what's the deal here? Impedance matching,coupling efficiency and planar antenna array designs are. Technically any power of 2 fraction of a given wavelength can be used for an antenna for that wavelength, if assuming an simple wire antenna. But the higher the order, the higher the impedance and the lower the coupling efficiency. With a clever choice of dielectrics the coupling efficiency can be brought back again into manageable regions. And thanks to numerical field simulations we can now design small antenna shapes that can work on much larger wavelengths.
FM radio is receive only, so you do not even require very good coupling efficiency, because you don't have to deal with TX reflection backlash. Hence the problem boils down to designing a reasonably small patch antenna for the 3m band and a receiver circuit that can deal with the high impedance and low coupling efficiency. Back in the day of radios made from discrete components that would have been prohibitively expensive, but these days you can throw a couple hundred of components at some unused corner of your RF grade semiconductor die and have dealt with it.