[LAD] Mini-ANN: linux-si470x (0.1)

[Mario Lang]

Hi.

I recently got myself an ADS InstantFM USB radio tuner card.
This is exactly what I always wanted, a tuner with a built-in
USB soundcard, so no need for loopback cables or anything.

It also happens to have RDS, which can be programmed from
user-space since 2.6.32.

So to celebrate the release of 2.6.32, I wrote a small
command-line tool (basically for myself) to work with that
card.  The tool impelemnts the following features as of now:
 * Decode most important RDS messages (program name, radiotext)
 * Allow for playback via JACK or ALSA
 * Allow to record to an OGG file

The recording and playback features are currently implemented
using helper tools: arecord, aplay, oggenc and alsa_in.

Here is the URL:
 http://delysid.org/linux-si470x.tar.xz

Future ideas:
 * Write the capture and playback code in C to allow for:
   * Stop during playback, buffering the audio for later playback.
   * Record during playback like time-machine: Buffer a defined amount
     of audio from the past, and use it when the user requests
     recording.
   * Maybe integrate libSoundTouch for realtime pitch shifting and
     time compression (if playback is behind realtime).

If you have such a card (luck you!) give the RDS decoding a whirl.
Patches of course always welcome.

P.S.: A very good existing tool for realtime playback
of audio for this tuner card is mplayer:
mplayer -radio adevice=hw=2.0:arate=96000 -rawaudio rate=96000 radio://91.2/capture

If all you need is this, by all means, go with mplayer.
linux-si470x is more geared towards integrating RDS decoding
into a command-line tool for operating these tuner cards.

P.S.2: Version 0.1 of linux-si470x is now 2 days old.
So this is indeed a very early pre-release.  But since I didn't find
anything equivalent, I thought I'd release it anyway in
case someone can make early use of it.
-- 
CYa,
  ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕