PC FM Transmitters?

[tvrforever]

I'm looking at getting an FM transmitter to allow the PC music to be picked up by our FM radios in the house.

These seem to be few and far between but I've found :-

www.arkon.com/sf.html

http://catalog.belkin.com/PureAV_detail.process?Merchant_Id=&Product_Id=166903

and my current favorite :-

www.myfmstation.com/html/linex_usb.html

Anybody had any experience? I'm concerned that their range appears to be 10-20 feet which certainly doesn't cover from the office to the lounge...

[rebelstar]

I think that the reason you're having difficulty finding something is that it's illegal to broadcast your own radio station (at least, more than a few feet). I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong These devices are often used to connect your CD/MP3 player to the car stereo with minimal fuss.

For the house, I've got myself a squeezebox (www.slimdevices.com or in my case, amazon). Of course, this only lets me listen to music on the stereo downstairs and not every radio in the house but it's still a nice bit of kit.

[tvrforever]

cool quite like that - but is there one that will do the same but also for WMA files?

[docevi1]

anything that broadcasts to FM is illegal, the iPod has iTrip and similar which do this and they are illegal in this country (doesn't stop people using them however).

You could make a "SlimBox" by installing Linux on an old machine somewhere and running it remotely...

Slight O/T but I quite fancy putting a Server somewhere in a house and putting touch-screens in all the houses in place of light-switches. The PC would control all the lights, tape things from TV... essentially run the house. Could be a fun project!

[tvrforever]

rebelstar said:

I think that the reason you're having difficulty finding something is that it's illegal to broadcast your own radio station (at least, more than a few feet). I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong These devices are often used to connect your CD/MP3 player to the car stereo with minimal fuss. For the house, I've got myself a squeezebox (www.slimdevices.com or in my case, amazon). Of course, this only lets me listen to music on the stereo downstairs and not every radio in the house but it's still a nice bit of kit.

Rebel - how do you find that working with WMA files? their www site claims to fully support WMA (among others) but some UK resellers specific state it doesn't...

[chrisjl]

tvrforever said:

Rebel - how do you find that working with WMA files? their www site claims to fully support WMA (among others) but some UK resellers specific state it doesn't...

I think the way that it supports all formats other than MP3 is that the host PC does the conversion to MP3 on-the-fly.

[rebelstar]

tvrforever said:

Rebel - how do you find that working with WMA files? their www site claims to fully support WMA (among others) but some UK resellers specific state it doesn't...

Haven't tried it yet - works fine with MP3 and OGG and the internet radio (SHOUTCast) is superb

I'll go and find a WMA file and give it a go. I don't have anything lying around at the moment but I'm sure I can find something from the almighty google.

Incidentally, I'm running my slimserver on Linux. I know someone with it running on Windows and I'll ask him about WMA on that when I see him tomorrow.

[julianhj]

You want one of these

Whack up the power and let the neighbourhood benefit

[rebelstar]

Back to squeezebox and WMA.

The answer is both yes and no. Since the decoding is done by the host PC, the problem is operating system specific. From what I understand, if you are running the slimserver on a windows box with a recent version of windows media player, you should be OK.

Unfortunately for us linux people, wma support was pulled in a recent version of the server. There are documented ways of getting it working again but I haven't had any success (yet).

[Bodo]

rebelstar said:

... Unfortunately for us linux people, wma support was pulled in a recent version of the server. There are documented ways of getting it working again but I haven't had any success (yet).

I got WMA running with Xine and Win32 codecs on Linux, after Ted offered the PistonFest broadcast teaser only in WMA.

However, building a music collection in an open and free file format is the way to go. How long will it take until you can only play proprietary DRM'd file formats on Windows and Macintosh computers? IIRC, it's already not possible to put music on an ipod without pulling it through Apple's software (suspicious ), and it's not possible to copy it off the ipod to another computer or device, unless you're using the ipod as a mobile storage (where you can't listen to the stored music).

Fraunhofer and Thompson Consumer Electronics do hold certain patents and commercial rights on the MP3 technology, which means they can control what is done with that format.

A very good alternative to these file formats (.aac .wma .mp3) is the Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) format ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis ). It offers better compression than mp3, while maintaining quality; and it is entirely free. Nobody can ever restrict the use of this format, or charge money for licenses. I've ripped all my ~570 CDs to Ogg Vorbis (I'm allowed to keep a private copy), and I'm now looking forward to a large range of players that support Ogg Vorbis (list here: http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware ). Although the format and its spec are accessible to everybody, Apple doesn't seem to like to offer it for their Ipods (probably because they don't want .ogg to disturb the deployment of their proprietary .aac format and thus making it impossible to control their user's music listening/buying behaviour.).

Not entirely hijacking this thread, I'd like to recommend the Neuros digital mp3 player www.neurosaudio.com/ as an alternative to tvrforever's finds. The Neuros is a portable player with harddrive in sizes between 20 and 80GB. It's quite heavy compared to its competitiors, but that shouldn't matter too much if one only uses it in the car and at home. It comes with "MyFi" FM broadcasting function, which works at home and in vehicles, etc.
The feature was originally not intended for use in Europe (these FM transmitters aren't legal in most European countries iirc), but since the manufacturer published the source code of the player's firmware (like operating system), some nerds adapted it for European conditions www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/01/neuros_open_source/
The best thing would be the portability of the music collection, and not having to boot the PC everytime when one wants to listen to his mp3 or Ogg Vorbis (the player offers Ogg Vorbis support too) -collection.

[rebelstar]

Bodo, I agree completely with regards to using an open format but if people are happy with WMA then that's up to them. I've been told that it's as good at 64k as MP3 is at 128k but I haven't tested it so I'm not in a position to comment. I've got my doubts though

All my encoding is done to OGG now; the slimserver likes it as does my iRiver portable player. The only downside is that the player in the car only does MP3 and WMA.