XM PCR Control Program for Mac OS X

nsayer writes "I'm a fan of XM Radio. The least expensive XM radio you can get is the XM PCR, which is powered and controlled over a USB connection to a host PC (the audio does not, however, come back across the USB connection. It's just got an analog line-out jack). Unfortunately, the only software they give you is for Windows. But fortunately, it's been reverse engineered, so I was able to write MacXM. At this point, it is very stable and easy to use, and so far as I know it is the only XM radio software that integrates with the iTunes music store (click a button and iTunes pops up with a search for the current song title and artist)."

Re:Is this the future of the "integrated" app?

[Da Penguin]

There are loads of such integration, thanks to the great design of Cocoa and Applescript. My favorite is Clutter [sprote.com], which automatically retrieves cover art for what you are playing in iTunes (plus loads of other features).

But you are right in that integration is (hopefully) the way of the future. It's happened more than a couple of times that I wanted to make something, and ended up building it around an existing program like the above.

And for those who do not know, almost all of the iApps have hooks so that other programs can, say, reference the itunes library, update the address book, modify pictures in your album . . .

Re:Is this the future of the "integrated" app?

[Da Penguin]

> Just thought I might point out that when Apple integrates
> products for the end user's convenience, they're
> innovators and geniuses, best thing since sliced bread,
> etc... But when Microsoft does the same thing, they're
> abusive monopolists who crush the little guy.

Apple doesn't integrate their apps into the OS. Apple integrates the many apps together with publically accessible APIs, so that other people may do the same.

Plus many times when they come up with some useful functionality, they put it into the API so that others may profit from their work.

Re:Is this the future of the "integrated" app?

[ZackSchil]

Not only are most of the APIs public, most of them are even in AppleScript, which allows not just developers but end users as well to take advantage. Take away the sarcasm of this post's grandfather and you have the truth. When Microsoft integrates things, it is almost always to crush 3rd parties or exercise power. When Apple does it, they end up innovating or coming up with a better product. Gotta love it.

Re:XM radio

[TellarHK]

When you've spent a few billion to put the two biggest commercial satellites ever built into orbit, you tend to get a bit protective of your profit stream. XM is a -great- thing to have, I've had a unit in my car for about the past year. They use something like a 192Kbps AAC stream from the satellite down, if I recall correctly. Very good quality, even on the Bose system in my car.

Re:XM radio

[wolrahnaes]

Acidus (yes the same Acidus from the Blackboard stuff) had written a paper on XM Radio. It is available here [se2600.org].

He had some thoughts on the format and quality of XM streams.

=Compression=

The number of theories of the compression schemes that XM uses is around the
number of Grassy Knoll theories. MP2, MP3, AMBE, AAC, the list goes on and on. A
few things are known. XM Radio had a contract with Digital Voice Systems, Inc to
use their AMBE (Advanced Multi-Band Excitation) speech compression algorithm.
The XM Radio Customer Agreement states that the AMBE technology in their product
is copyrighted and licensed for their use. That makes it safe to say that AMBE
is used at least in part to compress the speech-only channels. Since the STA450
has a built in EPAC decoder, it is safe to assume that at least a bulk of the
music is encoded with this algorithm. This conforms to a claim made by an XM
engineer that their compression technology is similar to Mpeg-4.

Re:So much for the marketing people

[proj_2501]

I would not be terribly surprised if Apple just paid the guy off and started including this thing in a future release of iTunes, although it would probably take a couple generations before this happened.

Several additions to Mac OS 7.5 came directly from shareware programs. The Menu Bar Clock was originally SuperClock! which was distributed with a Macworld book. The submenus under the Apple Menu were also available as a shareware add-on, as were the PopupFolders (when you double-click on a folder and hold down the mouse button, the folder opens up up in a window right under the pointer)

Stream XM Radio

[Anonymous Coward]

I forget where the post was saying "If the stream was good enough I would pay $10 a month" "And I could listen to is anywhere on the internet". I think there is a misunderstanding on what this XM radio does. It doesn't stream anything over the net. Period. It's simply a receiver to pick up the sat signal. The software controller sends its request over the USB cable to change channels, etc.- while the line-out goes to your home stereo unit. So in short no XM radio streams over the net :-)

Re:Java/Cocoa App Great!

[nsayer]

I've learned quite a bit from MacXM. If I had to do it again, I'm not so sure I'd use Java. Not that I wouldn't rather use it, it's just that if you're writing Cocoa using Java, you're a second class citizen. There are a number of things that are made a lot more difficult that shouldn't be.

1. Where is the Java version of runSelectorOnMainThread? That is, in a case where in a Swing app you'd have said SwingUtilities.invokeLater(), what are you expected to do in Java/Cocoa? I had to roll my own NSTimer event to poll a queue for invokes. Ick!
2. If you have a C main(), as is the case with the default Java/Cocoa template in ProjectBuilder, why can't you use the Info.plist properties to adjust things like the JNI library path? Alternatively, where is the Java version of NSApplicationMain()? Without a solution, you can't use System.loadLibrary();. There is an alternative Cocoa way to load them, but it winds up not being portable, which is an issue if you're talking about a potentially reusable model class. It also precludes you from selecting which version of the JVM gets used.
3. Why isn't there some nice facility to allow for a Java equivalent to Categories? I suppose subclassing is the only way. I wound up writing a proxy category for NSApplication in Re^H^HObjective-C to enable AppleScript handling. It's a bit ugly.
4. When you subclass a Cocoa UI object, you need to implement all of its constrictors, including the protected ones (the implementations just call the base constructor with the same arguments) used by the NIB loader. Naturally, those are undocumented. Fun!
5. The Java URL class can't handle arbitrary URL protocols without some shimming. Why, then, isn't there an overload to NSWorkspace.openURL() that takes a string? This is an issue because openURL() handles more types of protocols than the URL connection factories in Java do.
6. Why didn't they include javax.comm? That would have been a helpful fix for #2, at least for me.

There are others I can't think of right offhand. Don't get me wrong - I love Java, and I really love the combination of Java and Interface Builder. There are just a few issues that you run into when doing Java/Cocoa. I hope they get resolved soonoer rather than later.

Re:Sirius radio, much better shape?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, this statement is just plain wrong. XM is in far better financial condition. More debt, but they have eight times the number of subscribers, and that's the name of the game. To put it in perspective, Sirius had a total of $2,000,000 (that's right, two MILLION) dollars in revenue for last quarter. That's on 1.75 BILLION in market capitalization (and $250 MILLION in debt, on top of that). Sirius will probably make it, but it will be years before they will break even. XM will clearly cash flow breakeven around the end of '05. The real kicker is XM's product development, though. Sirius has been weak, weak, while XM is innovating from the word go. It really is no contest.

Re:XM radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Your remarks are those of a person who obviously hasn't tried the product. XM will have 1.3-1.4M subscribers by year end. Now, it takes a lot more (5M) to break even, but a million cars will be factory equipped with XM for '04, and we know that historically, 70-75% of those million become paying subscribers. Furthermore, we know that "subscriber churn" is in the area of 1% -- low, by ANY standard. The bottom line is it is largely a matter of getting people to try the product. Once they do, they can't get by without it. There simply is no comparison between satellite radio and traditional FM. I have several thousand CDs in my collection and have not purchased six in the 18 months I've had XM. It is that good. Anyway, it is pretty clear the market is there and is growing extremely fast.