Citadel Syracuse cluster broadcast engineer Alan Jurison is having fun playing with his new Apple iPod Nano, which includes the analog FM tuner.
He told me the new product has great RDS support along with RDS+ tagging. “When you launch the radio for the first time, it asks what region you’re in. So it works internationally as well.”
Alan has used the Nano in Syracuse, Detroit and Los Angeles as well as Australia, where he was recently on vacation. The tagging feature only works on stations encoding for it, which he found have been limited in those U.S. cities, and with no stations in Australia encoding for tagging at last report.
“The ‘Live Pause’ feature is neat, it even caches the RDS messages the station sent in real time with the audio,” he tells me. “However, there isn’t a way to store the recordings, just a way to pause 15 minutes of live radio.”
He’s still mastering the navigation as enabling the pause makes navigating the iPod a little more difficult, because the center tap and next track/previous track/volume buttons now serve three purposes: to turn up the volume, change the station and fast forward/rewind the recorded audio from the station.
What are your experiences with the new Nano? I’m curious. E-mail me at [email protected].
