Despite all of the nice features of Yahoo's Launchcast internet radio service which I described yesterday [fluggart.com], I have actually cancelled my subscription and moved to Sirius Satellite radio [sirius.com]. I bought a TimeTrax Sirius Connect package [timetraxtech.com] from TimeTrax Tech and have been listening to that ever since. The package allows you to connect a Sirius radio to a Windows computer. One major feature that attracted me to the service was that the software provided allows you to rip the songs to MP3.
When you are away from the computer that the satellite radio is attached to, Sirius allows you to listen to the music stations (but not the talk stations, which are almost half of the channels) over the web through an interface that is similar to Yahoo's Launchcast [yahoo.com]. The Sirius web interface does work in Mozilla Firefox, however you may not be able to see the artist and song title. For that reason, I end up only using it through Internet Explorer. I haven't tried it on Mac, but I couldn't get it to work in Linux. A screenshot of the Sirius web interface is in the image below:
Overall, I am pretty happy with the Sirius service. They seem to offer less music stations than Yahoo's Launchcast, but there are still plenty to choose from. I am primarily interested in Classic Rock and Country music, and there are several stations in those genres for me to listen to. Sirius also offers a ton of talk radio stations, including ones that broadcast sports games live. The variety of talk stations is pretty amazing, and I find myself listening to the news stations frequently.
Unfortunately, the TimeTrax software (TimeTrax Recast) is a little buggy. It also requires a lot more resources than I expected. I initially had the software installed on a computer that had a 1GHz Athlon (Thunderbird core) with 768MB RAM, running Windows XP Pro SP2. However, the software does a lot of writing to the disk, and the amount of activity caused the computer to be unusable for other things at the same time. When I installed it to a computer that had an Athlon XP 1700+ and 1GB RAM running Windows XP Pro SP2, the computer was usable for other tasks while the TimeTrax software was running. Therefore, I think that the minimum requirements (which are not listed on their website), are somewhere in between those two computers.
Above is a screenshot from TimeTrax Recast. There is the Now Playing box, showing the artist and song title of the current song. There is the recording box, which allows you to rip the audio to an MP3. The Presets box contains 12 buttons that you can set to jump to your favorite stations. At the bottom, there are meters showing the signal strength. Finally, at the right, there is the Quick Choice Menu, which allows you to bring up different windows or enable/disable common options without having to go through the other menus.
I mentioned in the previous paragraph that I thought the software was buggy. Frequently, when you hit a button, the display changes as though the button-press was registered. However, later it is apparent that the button press was NOT registered. For instance, if you hit one of the preset buttons to change to another radio station, the display will change and show you the artist and song title playing on the new station. However, the audio won't.
The interface is also kind of slow. For instance, when changing radio stations, there will often be a 1-2 second delay in between when you hit the preset button and when the audio actually changes to the new channel. As a result, it's not quickly apparent if the button-press actually registered or not. And cycling through a few channels to hear what they are playing takes too long to be practical. Fortunately, there is a window you can pull up which shows all of the stations and what they are currently playing.
There are many settings you can configure in order to rip audio content to MP3. For instance, you can configure the software to save the MP3s in a format like "artist - song title.mp3". However, almost all of the recording settings are global (instead of being able to set certain settings for one scheduled recording, and different settings for another scheduled recording. I bought the package specifically because I wanted to time shift talk radio, and also music. However, this is very difficult to do with the TimeTrax software.
For instance, there is a setting that prevents TimeTrax Recast from saving an MP3 if the song has already been recorded. This is good for music, but not good when you are recording talk radio (on talk radio, all of the "song titles" are going to be the same). So, you have to disable that setting if you want to regularly record the same talk radio program. Unfortunately, this means that when you have the software record music, it is going to save all of the songs to MP3, regardless of whether they have already been previously ripped or not. This behavior is annoying.
Also, you can configure the software to save the date that the MP3 was recorded in the filename. This is useful if you are going to regularly record the same talk radio program. However, this is also a global setting, meaning that when you have it record music, it is going to put the date in the filename for those MP3s too.
Update: More comments on January 20, January 23, and February 1.
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