I was introduced to Bill Baxter, one of the founders of new startup SnapTune, today. The company will be launching this week. With a little user configuration, Snaptune will automatically downloads songs and other content directly from an FM radio to your computer, and add meta data from Amazon and other sources.
Setup requires a download (PC only right now, so I had to break out my old laptop), and connecting a FM receiver to the PC (including just about any FM radio via line in). The service also shows song information, including information obtained from Amazon.com’s web service.
Snaptune One works with most FM tuner cards and USB FM devices, or you can simply connect an FM radio up to line-in on your PC to get started. For less than $2 for a simple cable you can get started with Snaptune today and start discovering an endless supply of new music. With a USB FM tuner you get the added benefit that Snaptune can tune to different stations for you according to a schedule you define.
Snaptune One works with almost any radio station anywhere in the world. FM radio goes in, individual songs come out, it’s that simple!
Snaptune One also shows you information about each song, the albums that contain it, other albums by the same band, how popular it is on the radio, how new it is, whether it’s going up or down in popularity, and detailed reviews for the albums from Amazon.com. With a couple of clicks of the mouse you can add any album you like into your Amazon.com shopping cart.
According to Bill, Snaptune is able to find complete songs and other content in audio streams by using “advanced signal processing and search techniques”. When I pressed him for more details, he wouldn’t budge, citing IP protection concerns (fair enough), but added “it just works, try it!”
Well, I wasn’t able to try it because I couldn’t find a USB FM receiver for my computer today (Fry’s for some crazy reason doesn’t carry them). I’ll be doing more “research” tomorrow though. Bill tells me CompUSA carries a bunch of different brands.
Based on one of the screen shots, though, one thing is certain - Snaptune will do a good job pulling in meta data about the songs from Amazon and other sources (including user created data).
Once the hardware is setup and the client installed, you simply set your favorite radio stations (and if you like, specific times of broadcasts), and Snaptune will automatically download the music and metadata for you. This is a music discovery service - like Pandora, you tell it something about what you like (in this case, certain stations and times), and Snaptune selects music for you based on that information. While you can use existing software to record FM on your computer, Snaptune does all of the hard work for you and guarantees full audio of the songs, etc.
For free accounts, you can move up to 20 songs to your hard drive in MP3 or WMA format. You can, of course, then move these to a portable device, burn to cd, etc. There will also be an option for a premium account, which will have no limits on downloading to hard drive/devices.
For premium accounts, it would be really great if they set up a RSS feed and included each song as an enclosure.
Snaptune’s other founders include Mark Atherton, Warren Burch and Ian Mercer. The company, which is self funded (that’ll change soon) is based in Bellvue, Washington.
As I mentioned above, Snaptune should be launching this week. To be notified when it goes live, enter your email here.
Existing competitors in this space include Replay Radio and RadioTime.
NOTE: I’m trying to figure out if I like this service better than Pandora. They are both excellent ways of discovering new music. With Pandora, you get instant gratification but no way to keep the music you like without buying it separately. I think I’ll use both. 
“Remember recording radio to cassette?” haha, the entire household (my parents) were terrorized, I recorded from a portable radio to a portable cassette recorder over the built-in microphone, so everyone had to stay in silence
hehe, those were the days
I haven’t even seen a cassette in years..
wow, now that I think about it, neither have I.
I remember using cassette’s to store data way, way back…
This is a lot like Radio Shark. See:
http://www.griffintechnology.c.....adioshark/
It’s also a bit like the failed (for legal reasons) BitBop tuner from AudioMill:
http://archive.salon.com/tech/.....print.html
It’s a good idea and will get better with digital receivers…
You said it’s PC only, but it’s really Windows only. It’s still sad to see how much windows == pc for too many people.
Is this entirely legal? Wouldn’t one need permnission from the holder master recording holder in order to make a digital copy of it?
Nevertheless, it’s very cool.
This is eerily reminiscent of Xenote.
god, nostalgia! you just have to love it..
i still have some of cassettes at my house. i guss it’s better for me not to reveal the names of the band
the fun stuff was to roll the spool and that the fingers always stuck inside it
btw neat site!!
How easy is it to set up the hardware and software? Is it ‘installation for dummies’?
Also, are there any legal ramifications of this service?
Rgardless, seems like a great idea.
sounds nice so far. the thing i don’t like about it is that you’re still stuck to analog radio sources. there are products and services out there that do the same thing with online radio streams (as the Webradio Recorder from Magix, for example, http://site.magix.net/english-.....-recorder/).
ok, there you’ve got initial costs, but then you can even search for your favorite artist or song within a stream…
Re. Marcus & Saul’s ‘Legal Ramification’ points, theoretically it’s no different from radio recorded to tape - the end result (a copy of a song from the radio) is the same. The only potential fly in the ointment is that in the US the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been introduced since the demise of tape recording.
If the DMCA is only used to stop an increase in potential methods of infringing, snaptune should be fine. If the RIAA or someone tries to regress to a position similar to music recording BEFORE even tapes were used to make copies, it’s a whole different ball game.
If they went for this approach they’d be even more pilloried than they are at the moment and it would also open the whole ‘Sony Betamax’ can of worms (which would suggest such a service is legally acceptable.)
My guess is they’ve got bigger battles to fight.
whats wrong with streamripper?
I really cant wait to see what happens with this and DMCA becuase someone is sure to kick up a stink about this sort of thing if it gets popular enough.
Blaze: I dont want to give them any credit but I suspect the likes of DMCA has been planning for something like this for some time.
sure…it’s a nice site. but who’s really going to use it? i listen to the radio when i have one, but when i’m at my computer i have a million better things to listen to - my own music, itunes radio, and kexp.org for starters. i’m not going to go out of my way to listen to the radio on my computer.
There’s a company here in Tulsa leasing rack space all around the US that monitors ALL AM and FM frequencies and reports back what was played, when, etc. presumably for payment processing. Been doing it for a couple of years… So, there’s no real secret IP sauce in being able to do it. Just proprietary implementations is all.
“IP protection”, indeed.
It’s probably using TRM fingerprinting. MusicBrainz uses the whole-file version but there’s a snippet-capable version available if you pay for it.
It can sniff a tune out after 3-10 seconds in most cases.
I don’t know - the legal aspect of this seems questionable - seems that if you can bring an FM played song into digital format (without paying for the song) then how does this differ from illegal file downloading and sharing? If this is 100% ok then the IPOD could do this all day long. Seems this would be problematic right from the start because of the transfer to digital. We are moving in this direction but the free capture of music in a digital format from the radio I would think should have artists/labels worried if there is not protection layer - thanks in advance for any thoughts -
Is this legal?
FM quality music isn’t digital quality music.
The RIAA is mostly concerned with making direct digital copies of anything. That’s why they are restricting digital radio recording, satellite radio recording, etc.
Unless they’ve decided it is illegal to record to cassette tape for personal use, this shouldn’t be different.
OTOH, they’d even take our babies if they could figure out a way to do it in court.