Posted By Paul Kafasis on September 30th, 2007

We released our newest product Radioshift last Monday, after almost a year and a half in development. In one form or another, Radioshift has been brewing for years. This concept has long been known internally as AHT, short for Audio Hijack Timeshifter. The aim of AHT was always to improve the experience of recording radio. A large chunk of Audio Hijack Pro users record internet radio and we’ve gradually added features to make this easier. However, it was never the focal point of the application, and it’s never been as simple as we’d imagined it could be.

The way to truly make recording easy is a guide which contains information on available radio. Part of how TiVo has improved upon the VCR is through its guide. This guide makes it possible to set a recording by browsing and clicking. No longer do you need to know when a show is on, what channel, and so on. But a guide for internet and AM/FM radio? It’s huge, there are thousands of stations, they’re always changing – it’s way more complicated than TV. No one could ever organize it all, could they?

It turns out someone could and someone did. RadioTime has been working to catalog the world of internet and AM/FM radio since 2002 and their guide now tracks over 50,000 different listings. Bill Moore, the visionary founder of RadioTime, had actually made us aware of the guide way back in 2003. However, it wasn’t a good fit for us at the time (technologically or economically), so it simply lingered in the backs of our brains.

It wasn’t until 2006 that we realized we wanted to make a new product dedicated solely to recording radio content. We wanted to simplify this task and take it out of the hands of the technophiles and into the hands of to the masses. With this vision, we went to Bill and RadioTime. We found that the guide had matured greatly and now featured an excellent SOAP API. Quentin rapidly cooked up a demo application to test it out and within a week we were talking to the RadioTime guide.

We’ve been working concretely on Radioshift ever since, with our newest employee Guy leading development. A little less than a year after we worked out our agreement with Bill, we finally have that new product with which we hope to change the world of radio on the Mac. Radioshift is finally here, thanks in no small part to RadioTime.