Home > Consumer Reviews > ADS RDX-155-EF Instant FM Music

This radio was very easy to install and the retractable antenna is cool and works well. The Instant Radio application is simple, but functional for radio listening or basic recording, but the Snaptune One software is very cool. You have to set up a recording and let it go for a while, but after a couple of days I had more than 80 songs....50 of them had artist name, song title and ablum art....very cool. Then I just right clicked on the song title and sent the songs to iTunes. The audio quality is FM, but sounds pretty damn good for FREE Songs.

I have issues with the false and misleading advertisement from Instant FM Music. The product website leads you to believe that Instant FM Music will work within Media Center. It does not work, this is very misleading.

I am not upset with the hardware aspect of the product, it works fine. It is the false/misleading software that was included that is an issue. The software that is provided with the product doesn't separate and identify songs unless you call a very small percentage of song identified less than 10 percent of those recorded as a working product. Even though songs are not recorded accurately, that is they are cut off at the beginning and run into other songs.

The device is not Tivo like as the advertisements claim. I can't go to a program listing and identify individual songs to record in advance at a specified date and time like you can with Tivo programs. Nor can you stream through your entire recordings to a specified date and time.

The product states "With Instant FM Music, consumers can select any of their local FM radio stations or Web radio broadcast from anywhere in the world and can capture their favorite songs, new music in their preferred genre, or create a complete library of their favorite artists for playback in the order they want,"

I have tried to capture some of my favorite Web Radio broadcast, Snaptunes is not able to capture, try capturing this through snaptunes [...]

It won't pickup Realmedia web stations, so it won't select "any" web radio as advertised.

It you change it to the Windows player [...] it works in Snaptunes but sounds as if it was a string and tin can versus how it plays in media player. Not good at all.

The product states it is "A complete hardware/software solution, the USB 2.0 audio capture solution is compatible with Windows XP and is Windows Vista-ready"

Since it says you need XP or Media Center to utilize the product, and it is Vista Ready, one would assume that it is XP Media Center would identify your product within the application, it does not and says no FM radio is installed. So while I can utilze the software that came with your product to listen to FM radio, I can't utilize Windows features, and since this is a Vista Ready device, once I upgrade I expect that I should be able to utilize Vista "media center" like features and access your product, I am guessing it won't work as it doesn't work now in Media Center.

I am not disappointed by the hardware aspects of the product, but feel that false claims were made regarding the software. Why didn't ADS just buy some reliable commercial product to bundle with the hardware rather than expecting the "freeware" Snaptune product to work. If I had know Snaptunes was so poor and a free product, while the hardware is great I would not have purchased this product.

This is a terrific device if you want to listen to local terrestrial radio on your computer and possibly record local segments or shows. Who is this device made for? Anyone that wants to hear local radio at work but has streaming blocked by their I.T. department (this picks up over-the-air signals), people that want to hear talk shows but aren't able to hear them in real time can record them (like TIVO for Radio you can select a specific time and day and Instant FM does the rest automatically for you) or people like me that are in the radio businesses and have need to record live air-checks while on the go. All recorded content can be played back on any MP3 Player or burned to a CD for later consumption. It's handy, cleaver, useful and I'm glad to own one.

This seems like a really nice toy. You plug it into a USB port, install the software, and can play FM radio directly from your computer. You can automatically record from any single station, either continuously or at selected times. The software tries to identify individual songs for you, which is a really neat trick.

BUT (and this is a real big BUT):

You can't export the songs from the Snaptune player. If you were hoping to listen to them on your iPod or save them to your hard drive, TOO BAD. The software was intentionally crippled to make this impossible. I'd think there would be big red warning to this effect in the description. I would never have bought this product if I realized it was less functional than simply plugging a radio into my line-in jack.

If you just want to timeshift-- say, automatically record a morning show so you can listen to it in the evening-- this may be a good product for you. If you were hoping for more, you're going to be savagely disappointed.

Good points: One of the very few programmable FM tuner accessories for a PC. Reasonably good sensitivity with the retractable antenna (considering it is indoors.) Works well with Snaptune. Contrary to another review, I was able to store timed recordings and Snaptune captured songs to mp3 (had to manually store songs one by one for the latter type.)

Bad points: The captured sound seemed to pick up supply line hum and clicks from the USB port power (seemed to correlate with disk drive activity, etc.) I was not able to locate a suitable connector for connecting to an outdoor antenna. Figure on just using the included antenna unless you are really good with micro-soldering. Could not get a clean install of the Instant FM application program on Windows Vista Premium (driver not recognized), had to use Snaptune. Hardware not recognized by windows media center (MCE), so can't use MCE or MCE remote control. Snaptune song recognition takes a long time and is inefficient compared to web radio station capture with Winamp/Streamripper. So I consider Snaptune only useful for recording on-the air radio, not web radio.