Real-Time Radio Search Engine From Music Industry's Nemesis

An anonymous reader writes "From the guy who brought you CD syncing and the original music locker (both of which saw lawsuits from record labels) comes the latest invention to rock the music world: a real-time radio search engine. 1000s of worldwide stations are indexed in real-time and users can search and play most any popular artist — even the digital holdouts (Tool, Led Zeppelin, etc) that are unavailable on paid services like Spotify. (Kinda wonder why Google hasn't done this.) Link on main page points to an API for those who want to build mobile and web services."

Innocent?

[kubajz]

This seems quite innocent and hugely useful at the same time - can anyone see the angle from which the rights holders will most likely try to attack his effort? :)

How is this new, exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've already got an app that I use for searching and listening (and even recording) called TuneIn... It's on iOS, Android, and has a web interface as well.

http://tunein.com/

Not sure what this really brings to the table.

MR Responds

[Michael Robertson]

Always nice to get a mention on Slashdot... except for the idiot in Brazil who is spidering the site and will be blocked in 3, 2, 1.... Some of my inventions have been blazed new trails like DVR for radio (DAR.fm), CD syncing (BeamIt), and the music locker (MP3tunes) but I don't think this service is in the same category because it's really an intelligence layer on top of radio. What news.google.com did for newspapers, we're trying to do for radio: make it searchable, bubble up top content and ultimately give users much more control. That's always a good thing in my book. The commenter who said we don't rebroadcast is accurate. The stream goes from the broadcaster directly to the end user's computer. It's worth nothing that the broadcaster may have royalty obligations similar to how Pandora has to pay royalties or any other online streamer. The record labels and the publishers are being paid. If you have suggestions for the service, please email me. [e-mail] Thanks!

Re: Internet radio quality sucks.

[supersat]

High bitrate (128+ kbps) streams are almost always strictly better than FM. FM audio is band-limited to about 15 KHz so they have bandwidth for stereo (the 19 KHz pilot and 30 KHz of bandwidth around 38 KHz for the stereo signal).

One other dirty little secret of the radio industry is that many studio-transmitter links are just 128 kbps ISDN links -- most of which are MP3, although newer equipment supports AAC as well. Additionally, while the exact codec of HD Radio is a trade secret, it's thought to be very similar to HE-AAC running at 96kbps. Even 64kbps HE-AAC sounds pretty good.