radioSHARK

It took some time for it to become avail­able in Den­mark, but now it’s here: the Grif­fin radioSHARK. A sim­ple lit­tle piece of equip­ment capa­ble of receiv­ing AM/FM radio. The lit­tle fin con­nects through USB, doesn’t require any setup and comes with timeshifting/recording software.

The build qual­ity is decent and though the metal-look stand is a bit too shiny to my lik­ing, it seems solid. When con­nected the three wawe-shaped holes on each side light up in blue — when record­ing they turn red. A nice lit­tle touch. You can con­nect head­phones directly to the fin, but you can’t hook it up to an exter­nal antenna unfor­tu­nately. In the mid­dle of the city I often find it hard to get good recep­tion, even on the pub­lic national radio.

It lets you record in either AIFF or AAC, guess an MP3-option would have been nice. You can adjust your record­ing set­tings eas­ily, just as you can plan record­ings, repeat them and have them auto­mat­i­cally added to your iTunes radioSHARK playlist. I just recorded a show on Georg Bran­des while I was on the phone and have cho­sen to sync my playlist with my iPod mini so now it sits and wait to be played while I com­mute. Nice, nice.

The soft­ware is easy to use. On the other hand it doesn’t con­tain any killer fea­tures. You should be able to script your way out of that one, though. Haven’t played with the time-shifting fea­ture yet, but basi­cally you just set the size of your buffer, and you’ll then be able to pause Lille Lars while you’re on the loo. Can’t miss out on all the clever stuff he says, right?

Now I just wish I had the skills to auto-podcast any good record­ings (oh, for­got — the qual­ity of the record­ings are just fine!) so peo­ple could ben­e­fit from my fin…

Nice­cast update: I tried to stream the radio to iTunes through Nice­cast, but had trou­ble get­ting any sig­nal into Nice­cast when select­ing the radioSHARK appli­ca­tion. As it turns out, it isn’t the actual app that plays the audio but a hid­den process called radioSHARK­Server. To get the list of hid­den processes, hold down Option when select­ing the appli­ca­tion drop­down in the source drawer.