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Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

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Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#291

Post by wnissen »

petercooper wrote: post #167
Razengan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the Apple Music radio, Beats 1 or what was it, have human-curated streams too?

Yes, and full on shows. I've listened to Elton John's show a few times. Amazingly broad and eclectic music and more eye opening than I'd have expected - he seems to like a bit of everything.

"Elton John has another habit, a habit he has had since he was an adolescent. Every new-release day, he goes shopping for records. If in England, he does this on Mondays at an HMV in London. In the United States, it's on Tuesdays and usually at a Tower Records in Atlanta. He buys not just every new release but, if he thinks it will be a record he'll like, a copy for every house." http://www.eltonjohnitaly.com/theusual-articolo.html

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#292

Post by tetrep »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #111
amelius wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that if everybody followed your example, they will at one point block NoScript too? Also, half of HN would be out of a job :)

Setting aside the why and wherefore; how would they block NoScript?

Render the page invisible, make it viewable with JS and/or just use an XHR to load the content.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#293

Post by flubert »

danjc wrote: post #69
alsetmusic wrote: post #53

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…

Agreed. You don't realize how invasive radio and TV advertising is until you don't have it.

Maybe not for everyone, but my local Christian station doesn't have ads.

http://www.klove.com/music/radio-stations/radio-station-down...

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#294

Post by fps »

Aoyagi wrote: post #108
gambiting wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of contracts. Every single phone on the market can turn itself into a wireless hotspot, but in US carriers have an ability to disable that option completely for users who haven't paid for a "tethering" package. It's crazy if you ask me.

I mean I knew American telcos were scum, but this is utterly ridiculous. What if you buy a device from abroad?

if you buy an unsubsidized android device, the carriers don't get to tweak the functionality of the device. It doesn't have to be from an international seller - I bought my device directly from Motorola and just put my T-Mobile SIM card in it. However, it still comes with the US version of Android, which doesn't support the FM receiver.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#295

Post by Zak »

drdaeman wrote: post #194
kalleboo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remove the abstractions down to "someone emits some electromagnetic radiation" then yeah it makes no sense. Just like saying "someone out there is mixing hydrocarbons with rocks and dumping it on the ground that you may or may not care about". Most people would rather discuss it in terms of "funding an independent source of media" and "building road infrastructure to move goods and services".

I'm not sure comparing radio with roads is correct. For roads, maybe somewhere it's the same, but there are also funding ways that work differently. If you use the road (have a vehicle) you (probably, depends on where you are) pay the tax, either directly or included with the fuel price. If you don't drive a vehicle but use the roads indirectly (because the services you use, use that roads) you pay indirectly - troug…

Public schools or libraries are probably a better analogy.

In the US, various forms of taxation at the federal, state and local level go in to providing funds for public schools. Everyone pays for schools even if they have no children. The only significant exception is that in some places, parents can receive vouchers to pay for private schools. Either way, the goal is that everyone receives a basic education to make a better society.

Everywhere in the US I've had a library card, it was similar. Libraries are funded by general taxes and their basic services are provided without charge to users who live in their tax area (county, most places).

Whether publicly-funded radio stations are a valuable public good in this way is reasonable to debate, but that's the model.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#296

Post by bmm6o »

orbitur wrote: post #259
rplst8 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suppose long term FM is dead, but meanwhile it has its uses. If true, this is really unfortunate. I've written about this before, but FM is a really great technology, and in a lot of ways it's only suffering because of the content. The sound quality of digital "equivalents" (XM Radio, HD Radio, Internet Radio, etc.) doesn't even come close to a clear FM station. Not to mention there are millions of vintage radios…

As an aside, I got a free SiriusXM trial with my new car, and the sound quality is terrible compared to FM. I was honestly reminded of the MP3s I got from Kazaa and burned to a CD in 2003, you can hear the aggressive compression.

It seems like it really varies between channels, especially between talk and music but also within categories. I assume they allocate more bandwidth to the more popular/lucrative channels. I find the quality to be fine on the ones I listen to (e.g. SiriusXMU).

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#297

Post by macintux »

nitrogen wrote: post #286
macintux wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OEM radios tend to have pretty good ergonomics anyway. I'm appalled at the UI for radios these days. Obviously feature overload has a lot to do with it; I wish someone would make opinionated car stereos like Apple does for other consumer tech. "You don't want this feature because the tradeoff is more complexity."

I'd rather have, "We know some of you want this feature so we spent considerable time giving it to you without the complexity."

That's obviously better but often not possible when taking into account the constraints of a single DIN.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#298

Post by mtreis86 »

nameless912 wrote: post #270
mtreis86 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish a flagship phone would come with an SDR built into it. You can currently get a rtl-sdr to work with a phone through http://sdrtouch.com/ but that requires an external chip. I want a phone with a SDR, and an FPGA so I don't need to run the samples through the cpu for filtering. An rf-hacker phone. Someone make this, please.

The market for this is hilariously vanishingly small. There's no way anyone would ever manufacture this at scale for the 1% of 1% of people who even know what SDR is.

They already have an sdr in them - its just locked. Getting the open access to utilize those components as I see fit - that is a serious challenge.

Edited

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#299

Post by 8note »

DigitalJack wrote: post #247
jon-wood wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the BBC have such a wide range of music stations I can never comprehend why commercial radio is still a thing, and still so popular here. I'm probably not the target market though, since I also get irritated at the way all radio stations have about 15 minutes of music per hour, and the rest is filler from some smug DJ pretending to be your friend, and people calling in because they've got no one better to talk t…

I can't speak for the UK market, but in the US, public radio is biased left. I'm biased right, so it annoys me, but I love the stuff that isn't political, like Click'n'Clack (did that come back or is it being rebroadcast?). Commercial Radio has a non-government business benefactor, and so they cover what is of interest to them. Public Radio has government as it's benefactor, and so they cover their interests. Now it'…

Id say both fox and NPR are unbiased. Bias is pretty well defined by comparison to the audience, unless you're clakmjng theres some magical neutral, but theres no way to define such a thing!

so, fox's bias is the same as its audience, and NPR's with theirs, leaving no apparent bias for either of them.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#300

Post by [deleted] »

DigitalJack wrote: post #247
jon-wood wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the BBC have such a wide range of music stations I can never comprehend why commercial radio is still a thing, and still so popular here. I'm probably not the target market though, since I also get irritated at the way all radio stations have about 15 minutes of music per hour, and the rest is filler from some smug DJ pretending to be your friend, and people calling in because they've got no one better to talk t…

I can't speak for the UK market, but in the US, public radio is biased left. I'm biased right, so it annoys me, but I love the stuff that isn't political, like Click'n'Clack (did that come back or is it being rebroadcast?). Commercial Radio has a non-government business benefactor, and so they cover what is of interest to them. Public Radio has government as it's benefactor, and so they cover their interests. Now it'…

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