Nick Piggott said at January 28th, 2007 at 9:57am

I’m sceptical that the PopCatcher is a real technology, or that it behaves anywhere near its claims. Many things about their product just don’t ring true. It wouldn’t be unheard of for a technology company to claim remarkable functionality in a bid to raise profile and funding to explore whether or not their concept can be realised. I suppose this rash of blogging about it might just be step 1.

DRM is a concept that either requires 100% adherence, or it’s worthless. Given that it’s virtually impossible to get Asian manufacturers to 100% comply to anything (an experience we’ve had this week with anther allegedly reputable technology manufacturer), the DRM model is irreparably holed below the water line. Dutch boys, dykes, fingers and holes comes to mind, and who wants to run around sticking fingers in dykes for a living? Watermarking maybe - but absolutely control and protection is a flawed practicality.

Seb said at January 29th, 2007 at 11:02am

I am a happy owner of the popcatcher musicdock. I bought it two weeks ago, and to tell Nick Piggot above: It works fine.

However, there is a small thing with this technology that is a bit fun. The musicdock’s artificial intelligence needs to learn the difference between music and commercial and talk before it will work. This means that when I bought it it did not work (on a rock station in Malmö in Sweden) and was close to giving it back to the store. Because I am lazy I did not to this directly, and when I got back from work next day I had about 120 new songs in the mp3 player! ;-)

If this is a PR thing or not I can not tell the mr Nick Piggot above. But if it is not a PR thing, then I am sure that the bloggy blogg blog owners could get one musicdock to try by simple telling the persons behind popcatcher company that you do not trust them… (The power of people comes back with the blogs).

(By the way, I love rock and my musicdock works very fine still!)

James Cridland said at January 29th, 2007 at 11:33am

It’s not a PR thing: I’m not that clever. (Although are you a PR thing?)

I don’t doubt that, under certain circumstancts, the Popcatcher should work very nicely. The worry is what happens when the record companies cotton on.

Adam Bowie said at January 30th, 2007 at 11:43am

So the Podcatcher is actually a high-tech version of the top 40 cassettes I used to make back in the eighties. You know - sitting there carefully editing out “Number seven…” before releasing pause and recording Bananarama or whoever.

It wasn’t perfect, because intros were cut or faded into, and the sames true today with DJs “hitting the vocal”.

In the eighties, I had a cassette for Walkman (or more likely, non-Walkman personal cassette player), but did I actually stop listening to Radio 1 - the station that was playing all this music I loved?

Er, no.

Still isn’t there software that already does this kind of thing with streams of music? A quick Google reveals http://record-streaming-music.qarchive.org/ - and that names your mp3s too.