Linux-Powered Radios

Linux is already widely-used for embedded systems. Here's another interesting application, from a UK company, too:

EVOKE Flow brings you the huge variety of audio available on the internet, as well as traditional DAB and FM radio and your own digital music collection. All in a stylish portable radio that you can take with you wherever you go.

EVOKE Flow uses the same Wi-Fi technology as portable computers to connect to the internet wirelessly. Through this connection you can access thousands of radio stations from across the world, catch your favourite shows with listen again or enjoy a huge variety of podcasts. You can even use EVOKE Flow to browse and play music stored on a Wi-Fi-enabled PC.

In addition:

EVOKE Flow is powered by Imagination’s innovative hardware multi-threaded META processor and UCC (Universal Communications Core) technologies, which give the product advanced real-time signal processing and 32-bit application execution resources, as well as unique multi-standard high performance communications capabilities. EVOKE Flow is also one of the first radio products in the market to use the Linux operating system.

One of the first, but I predict it won't be the last....

DAB Dying?

It might seem strange that an avowed lover of high-tech and music should not have a DAB radio: but so it is with me. In part, it's because DAB in the UK seems to be worse than FM (at least that's what Jack Schofield says, and his argument looks pretty reasonable).

But it's also been from a gut feeling that this is the wrong way to go. It looks like I'm not alone:

In a sign of crisis for digital radio, UK commercial radio leader GCap will, as expected, sell its 67 percent stake in the DigitalOne DAB multiplex

...

”We believe that broadband is the ideal complementary platform to analogue radio given the interactivity that they both provide, creating social networks and communities on-air and online.”

I suppose what I'm looking towards is a radio with built-in Wifi to pick up radio-over-IP signals sent out by one of my computers. One reason for that is the extremely high quality of music online these days: BBC Radio 3, for example, is broadcast at 64 kps, which is pretty much CD quality in a domestic setting. Who needs DAB?