Recording

It's going to get easier for Google to keep tabs on your health.

The ubiquitous tech conglomerate has signed on to a new software product created by IBM with help from the Continua Health Alliance, an organization that promotes interoperability of medical devices. It'll take data from personal health monitoring devices, like blood sugar meters for diabetics, and share that directly with the patient in question's Google Health file (and the patient's physician, if he or she uses Google Health as well).

Other personal health record (PHR) services will also be able to use the IBM … Read more

Recently, Digeo began selling its new Moxi CableCard DVR at Amazon for a whopping $800. That got us thinking about the whole DVR category, and how the real prices of the products are often hidden with subsidies (from cable or satellite companies) or service fees (such as with TiVo).

If you're looking for a digital video recorder, your choices are limited by how you receive your TV signal--satellite, over-the-air antenna, or cable--and how much you're willing to pay a month. Satellite subscribers are shoehorned by their provider--Dish offers the excellent ViP722 (with the SlingLoaded ViP922 due later this year), and DirecTV offers the DirecTV Plus HD DVR HR21. Antenna-only folks were the most limited: previously, the only choice was TiVo (which, again, requires a monthly or lifetime fee for service), but the availability of the DTV Pal DVR offers the promise of a no-fee DVR with support for digital and HD TV signals--just pay for the hardware, and you're done. (CNET is currently evaluating the DTV Pal DVR, and will have a review later this month.)

For cable subscribers, things can be a bit more varied--and almost certainly more expensive. Nearly all cable companies now offer their subscribers an HD DVR option. They'll tout it as "free" (in that you don't have to buy the hardware), but your bill will undoubtedly include a rental charge for the hardware (and the remote!), as well as a "DVR service fee." Want to get a real TiVo instead? That may cut the rental charge and DVR service fee from your monthly cable bill, but then you're stuck paying a service fee straight to TiVo ($13 a month, $129 a year, or a flat $400 fee for the lifetime of the box). Meanwhile, your cable company still gets in on the action; they may still charge you for CableCard rental fees (needed for the TiVo to receive digital and premium channels), plus the normal service fee on top of that (the channel charges that make up the bulk of your bill). Going with the lifetime fee (just because it's easy), that brings the real-world cost of the cheapest high-def TiVo, the TiVo HD, to around $700.

Enter the Digeo Moxi.… Read more

AT&T and Comcast, two of the nation's largest Internet service providers, are expected to be among a group of ISPs that will cooperate with the music industry in battling illegal file sharing, three sources close to the companies told CNET News.

The Recording Industry Association of America, the lobbying group representing the four largest recording companies, said last month that it had enlisted the help of ISPs as part of a new antipiracy campaign. The RIAA has declined to identify which ISPs or how many.

It's important to … Read more

I didn't imagine there was much room for innovation in USB-recording interfaces, but at the 2009 NAMM show--the annual convention for buyers and sellers of professional music gear (read: music gearhead paradise)--a couple of companies introduced some new takes on this very prosaic, but necessary, piece of gear.

For the uninitiated: A recording interface is the bridge between your musical output and your computer. You attach it to the computer, then plug your instrument (or multiple instruments, or output of a mixing board) into it, and voila. There are countless types of interfaces at all levels of price and complexity, but for home musicians who just want a quick way to get their musical ideas down on their hard drives, an inexpensive USB interface is the way to go. M-Audio is probably the best-known brand at this level, although Tascam and Edirol (part of Roland) are somewhat common as well.

… Read more

Alan Zweig's terrific YouTube video takes you deep inside the record collector's mind. The funny part is, even guys with 15,000 LPs don't think that they have a lot of records or consider themselves collectors.

Hey, some of us collect baseball cards or Corvettes. What's so wrong with filling your house with vinyl?

This snooping utility provides almost all the features essential for monitoring a PC, but we were especially impressed with its stealthiness. System Surveillance Pro logs keystrokes, IM chats, applications used, and Web sites visited, and can capture screenshots at user-defined periodic intervals.

The interface makes it easy to locate any log file you need to access. System Surveillance Pro can block Web sites via URLs or detected keywords, and includes a scheduler in case you don't need to monitor PC usage at all times. Like most respectable spying applications, it will send you e-mail reports so you can keep … Read more

VHS movies may be disappearing from store shelves, but we saw some evidence at CES 2009 that the VCR just isn't ready to die. In addition to Panasonic's surprising DMP-BD70V--a combo VCR/Blu-ray player--JVC and Toshiba also have new VHS/DVD combos lined up for 2009. Check out the slide show below for a complete comparison.

Update (4/19/2009): CNET now has a full review of the Zoom H4n.

I practically squealed when I saw Zoom's new H4n professional handheld audio recorder on display at CES 2009. The $350 recorder was announced just a few days ago with hazy details on when it might hit store shelves, but lo and behold, here it was hanging out in the Samson booth, dressed up with full retail packaging.

To read my first impressions, take a look through our Zoom H4n slide show, fresh from the showfloor of CES 2009.

The numbers are grim, all right, but the music industry still sells hundreds of millions of CDs each year. That's a lot of discs, and sales of downloads won't surpass silver discs for a while.

According to some industry sources, as recently as 2006, CDs represented more than 80 percent of the music sold in the United States. A recent report projects that it won't be until 2012 that download sales surpass CD sales. So fess up. A lot of you are still buying discs, and I want to know who you are.

I'm doing more … Read more