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Yay, Friday is here. I grew up watching Ira Flatow on Newton's Apple, the theme song has been in my head for decades it seems- I plan to find it and make it a ring tone. Anyway, each week on NPR, Science Friday hosted by Ira Flatow always has something I'm interested in and each week I record it, along with This American Life using the Griffin RadioShark- send to my shuffle and use it for weekend jogging.
Here's a picture of the Shark, eagerly awaiting the next time to record and here's what the UI looks like (image1, image2, image3, image4). There's a little port in the back of the RadioShark that can be used as headphones or from what I've found, seems to work as an antenna. For fun, I'm going to set my XM Satellite Radio to transmit via FM in the house, and set the RadioShark to record, it's weird way to record XM, but I think it'll work fine for what I want to do.
I don't use the Griffin RadioShark, although it does seem cool. I plug my Sirius Sportster directly into my mic input on the laptop and listen either through the built-in speaker, or through headphones.
A cool thing I do when I'm working and listening for long periods of time is to run Sony Sound Forge in the background. I create a preroll buffer of 10 seconds in the record dialog. That allows me to click the record button (or keystroke it) and get 10 seconds prior to that action. That way I can hear a good segment or song come on, click record and get the whole thing. A little trimming and I've got clean sound bites in all digital format.
Works for me : )
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i have to say that even with the very latest software, the radioshark is a serious POS for me. every recording has been corrupted. griffin says any mac with a USB port is good enough, but perhaps a 500MHz G3 iBook is not acually good enough. their tech support has been less than stellar.
a great MAKE project would be to figure out how to control the thing so we can ditch the crappy software and write our own!
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pfile- what type of issues are you having? it will record but the files won't play? i've used the shark on a lot of different macs and have yet to have a problem. feel free to drop me a note.
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The "Newton's Apple" theme is a song called "Ruckzuck" by the band Kraftwerk. It's from their first album, which is titled "Kraftwerk." This is from the period when they were still using a lot of live instruments, before they became a purely electronic dance group. The album was recently reissued I believe, after being mostly unavailable outside of bootlegs and collectable vinyl.
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Phil,
I'd have loved to read your article about all things WiFi from the magazine but I see you charge $35 annually. Then again, that's a lot cheaper then what Ira Glass charges, via Audible, for a one year subscription to "This American Life" which goes for $45 and works very well on your iPod. How do content creators get away with these exorbitant rates....
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