Recording radio shows - simplest way? Record to MP3,CD?
 

To occasionally tape a show off the radio (without using a pc), do I have any choice other than
an old-school portable cassette player/recorder?

Do the current crop of Radio/CD/MP3 Player Boomboxes have any function to record
directly off the radio?

There's a few out there.But you'll spend about $150-200 for good one. It depends how much you want it.
For example: http://www.hammacher.com/product/74225

If I wanted a good MP3 radio player, that's what I'd get.

Looks good, thanks. This is similar, with an old-style boombox look.
It would be nice if they had them a bit cheaper, but I guess they're
pretty durable.

http://www.geekalerts.com/ipod-boombox-radio/

That's an affiliate blog. The real site is http://www.firststreetonline.com/Ele...sic+Player.axd
And it's sold out.

The hunt is still on? :(

It's never easy, is it.

There is a tax applied to most recording devices that goes to the RIAA making them more expensive, that's why portable devices no longer have a record function as standard feature. That's also what makes an "audio" CD an audio CD becsue they are also taxed, portable CD burners will reject standard CD's for recording.

They unsuccessfully tried to get this applied to MP3 players and computer burners too however I would imagine anything like that device you listed will have the tax applied to it.

All of my mp3 players with a radio have a record function, so it's quite easy to record the radio directly to a wav file. I also have some of my devices modded with www.rockbox.org firmware, which also allows recording the radio with a variety of formats or quality. I find the quality no different than live radio. Your cellphone might also be able to do this. The chips used for radio in small devices are pretty high quality, so I'm guessing that the sound is as good as a good old analog tuner.

Here's another problem though, what's a device that can record files with RDS song information? All my local radio stations identify the current genre and song title playing, which I can see with an RDS equippped radio, but that device doesn't record the info. I suppose there's some usb stick tuner for PC which would do this.