Thanks for trying our service. You didn’t mention which client you tried, but I assume it’s the iPhone one. In order to provide listeners with as continuous an audio stream as possible, we measure the speed of previous downloads and use that to determine whether we send “hi-fi” or “lo-fi” files (we always assume the worst and start with lo-fi). Lo-fi quality is acceptable for news podcasts and most UGC, but is definitely suboptimal for listening to music with good earbuds. If you have a good 3G or WiFi connection, you’ll soon start getting “hi-fi” audio. Another possibility is that you heard some tracks that were processed using our LAME “compander” – I have heard the occasional subpar track coming out of that algorithm. If you let us know specifically which tracks were “horrid”, we’ll definitely look into it.

Radar> And the computerized voice from 10 years ago is terrible. And you to listen to a computerized voice reading text that has not been edited for a broadcast. So in the weather you hear zx23 zone 9 dot dot dot and so on.

Yes, I know that the TTS engine is not the best and often “terrible”. As usual, it’s a tradeoff between quality and price. But one of our intially favoured engines has recently reduced its price, so we’re looking into switching to it. And yes, the weather reports are automatically generated, but I’ve not heard anything like “zx23 zone 9 dot dot dot”. Again, if you tell us which one(s) are bad, we’ll gladly look into it.

Radar> And you call yourself a radio futurologist ? That’s a joke.

No reason to bash James – he writes about lots of interesting stuff and future trends (whether our service rightfully belongs in this category is still TBD) – I’d much rather hear from you directly at support@radioweave.com or dale@radioweave.com to help us improve our service.

Dale Low
radioweave.com

The main thing is the audio quality is just so bad. It sounds like a distorted record on an AM station from 1960 and the record was recorded in someone’s bathroom. Is this where audio quality is suppose to be in the year 2010 ?

And you call yourself a radio futurologist ? That’s a joke.

Here’s what is easier and much better on your ears. Make several awesome play list on your iPhone/iPod Zune or Wal-Mart mp3 player. Follow a few rss feeds and your done. You don’t have to suffer through all this crap to build your very own distorted audio channel with drop outs and such that sounds like it’s being sent from Haiti on a 56k moden that has connection problems.

Someone told me once to think of your radio show as whole bunch of 15 minute shows, rather than 1 long 4 hour show which makes sense as most people don’t tune in for the whole 4 hours.

And as for live radio.. well I too quite often work on a 15 minute delay for my drive time show. Allows me to nail everything, still topical, screen callers, it’s only a 15 minute delay so a story can develop through out the show with the news reader (who is live). It’s the Steve Wright effect.