The software cannot boot your computer for you, nor can it wake the machine from sleep. Scheduled recording is also a great feature, and works wonderfully as long as your computer is already on and awake. Like TiVo, the radioSHARK will change the way you listen to radio. The time-shifting features are invaluable, and after one afternoon, I was already addicted. The software works fairly well aside from the aforementioned quibbles. One eminently useful feature added by the newer software releases is LED control you can now choose to leave the radioSHARK in “night-light” mode, where it will light up a bedroom quite nicely, or you can turn the internal LED off so that you can actually sleep.
RADIOSHARK CARY UPDATE
To be fair, this version of the software (1.0.3) is a drastic improvement over the original be sure to run Check for Update in the application menu to get the latest version, if you haven’t already.
RADIOSHARK CARY PDF
There is no integrated Help, though a brief printed manual is included in the box and duplicated in PDF form on the software CD. A means of manual frequency entry (perhaps a “Go To Station” menu item) would also be welcome, as would a “New Preset” shortcut. There’s no capability to skip to the previous preset (you can skip forward through the preset list using the tab key), nor is there any way to jump immediately to a given preset, as there is on most digitally tuned radios.
The interface itself is simple enough, but there are some puzzling omissions.
RADIOSHARK CARY MAC OS X
The window widgets and buttons are non-standard and visually jarring, and the Presets and Preferences windows are standard Mac OS X brushed metal, making the aesthetic deficiencies of the main window even more glaringly obvious. Griffin’s interpretation of the Mac OS X brushed-metal look-perhaps they’re trying for the high-end audio gear appearance?-is reminiscent of an ugly WinAMP skin from the late 1990s. Its software, like its radio reception, leaves something to be desired. I’ve had Walkmans that got better reception without any antenna at all. Memo to Griffin: re-work the AM antenna design entirely, and include an external FM antenna with the device. Plugging a pair of headphones into this jack, as Griffin suggests, does indeed improve FM reception, but does nothing for AM. Strangely, the manual bears no mention of this whatsoever, though it is now mentioned on the radioSHARK support page. There is a combination antenna/headphone jack just above the USB cable on the back of the device. This makes the device essentially useless for AM radio.
Every other radio in the house picks it up with no static at all. My house is less than five miles line-of-sight from the transmitter of a major AM station, and the radioSHARK barely picks it up. I know it might be anathema to the designers, but adding a telescoping FM antenna like that found on most boom boxes would be a welcome improvement.ĪM reception, unfortunately, is even worse. Rather, the radioSHARK’s reception simply doesn’t stack up, for whatever reason, even with the USB extension cable-cum-antenna in place. Nor did Griffin “pull an Apple” and build a radio-reception device with the antenna inside a metal shell (TiBook, anyone?). It isn’t that the device’s appearance particularly impedes its function. Unfortunately, function follows form here.
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