It’s a world where ‘buy‘ means ‘rent‘ and ‘record‘ means ‘can’t record‘. It’s the world of the RIAA. This is almost too crazy to be true. Thanks to Gizmodo and Orbitcast, I found a story about the new Sirius S50, a dockable Sirius radio device that lets you record Sirius programming for listening on the go.
The big problem with this device, it appears, is that the spawn-of-satan RIAA seems to have designed its capabilities. If the news is to be believed, the device can only record one song at a time, or if you want to record a scheduled program it can only be a program with no music content.
I’m a fan of Sirius radio, but I predict they’ll sell about zero of these.
Here’s the gory details from Orbitcast.
I’ve got the Delphi MyFi XM2GO. It allows you to record the live audio and play it back later. It will record hours of audio. It shows you every song recorded by artist/title, but lists them in chronological order. It’s convenient because you can start playing and skip songs you don’t like (or commercials–yes XM has commericals on some stations). I’ve found the best use of the feature is to let it record from a favorite channel overnight. Then I listen to the previous night’s recordings and can skip stuff I don’t want to listen to. I hear that the record companies were giving XM a hard time about this feature as well.
It’s nice, but it ain’t no TiVo.
The other problem with the S50 unit is that it cannot receive Sirius broadcasts by itself. So, you can’t listen to Stern on the train in the morning unless you record yesterdays broadcast at home. No Thanks…
Plus, for over $400, I’ll spend my coin on an 60gb Ipod w/video.
Pretty frustrating …..