So I just stumbled upon the Myinee Abbee. It’s a combination FM radio+portable music player. The idea is simple enough: you tune the radio into a station, plug in the portable music player, then it records the audio directly to said player. Now you can walk around with a collection of songs that an overpaid, out-of-touch program director has put together based on his company’s national playlist. Wonderful.
The $250 device itself seems fine to me. My only hang-up is that it only works with FM radio, which is compressed like nobody’s business. So you can sit there and record a couple of songs, then walk around and hear all sorts of artifacts in there. But that’s probably not an issue for the people who still listen to FM radio.
There’s a bigger issue, though, and that’s that FM radio is garbage juice. If you leave the recorder on for a few hours, you’re going to run into the same seven songs at least three times. That’s not the device’s fault, of course, but is more of an indictment of commercial radio these days.
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