Chapter 15. Radio

In This Chapter

• Introducing FM Radio in Media Center

• Setting up Radio

• Connecting an external FM radio antenna

• Finding and storing radio station locations

• Pausing, playing, replaying , and skipping broadcast audio

• How to adjust your Radio setting

How many times have you been listening to the radio and wished you could rewind it and hear that last song ”or the DJ's shocking statement ”just one more time? It's never before been possible with an off-the-shelf consumer radio. Strangely, several years after the capability to delay, or time-shift, television was introduced in products like TiVo and ReplayTV, the much less technically challenging capability to time-shift live radio has finally made it to the consumer market. Thanks to the most recent version of the Media Center software, you can now treat FM radio transmissions in much the same way as TV programs.

There are some limitations to Media Center's Radio capabilities. For example, at present, you cannot save radio programs to play back later.

Technically, Media Center's FM Radio features do not support rewind, but you can use the Replay button to move backward or the Skip button to jump forward within the radio memory buffer.

As noted previously, anything you can do with video data is generally even easier to do with audio-only files, so it stands to reason that these record-and-store capabilities were left out intentionally, probably because of the outcry that would ensue from broadcasters and record labels if we could all suddenly make perfect digital recordings of radio broadcasts with ease.

There are still a few wish-list items for Radio features, which Microsoft or enterprising third-party developers can address. However, the core Radio capabilities in Media Center grant us a wish that has been unfulfilled since the invention of the wireless broadcast medium itself: the ability to go back and rehear a radio program, even as the broadcast continues.