Anubis

Radio Archiving Overview

What is Anubis?

Anubis is an application which allows the entire content of one or more radio stations to be recorded onto a computer's hard disk and replayed on demand at some point in the future. Similar to a Tivo for radio, but without the need to decide what to record up front. Anubis compresses the audio allowing even a modest hard disk (say 20GB) to store a month's worth of radio.

The motivations for developing Anubis:

• To allow one to finish listening to a radio play that starts while on a car journey and finishes after arriving at one's destination.
• To allow one to go back in time and listen to radio content when a friend says 'did you hear ... on the radio yesterday'.
• To allow one to collect together a series (e.g. Radio 4's 'Book At Bedtime') and listen to the series in a single session.
• To allow one to listen to radio content at a convenient time, including 'taking away' content in the form of portable MP3 player files, CD, MD or tape.
• To allow casual browsing of the last month's radio.

An Anubis system consists of the following components:

• A radio tuner.
• A computer with a sound card, Pentium class processor and some free disc space running the Anubis Radio Recorder.
• The same, or another, computer running the Anubis Player application.
• Anubis requires Windows .NET server, Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Windows NT. The player will also run on Windows 98 but this platform is not recommended for the recorder. Internet connectivity is required in order to download radio schedules.

The Anubis system works as follows:

• The radio tuner and 'recorder' PC is left running continuously. The Anubis Radio Recorder captures the radio audio via a sound card, compresses the audio using a codec and stores the files on disc. A single file is created for each day of radio.
• The files created by the Anubis Recorder are valid Windows WAV files and can be played using the MS Media player. Media player provides only basic navigation capability and this make its use impractical when each WAV file contains 18 hours of audio.
• Anubis Player is a custom media player which allows day length radio files to be easily navigated, played and transformed into files for MP3 players, CD, MD or tape. The Anubis
  Player automatically contacts the BBC or Digiguide web sites, downloads the appropriate radio schedules and 'connects' them to the recorded audio allowing a user to click on a program and have that program played from the archive file.
• Anubis currently supports BBC Radio 2, 4 and 7 from the BBC web site as well as all UK radio stations supported by Digiguide.