I've previously written about how I use Radioshift as part of my home automation setup. However, in the last week or so I've been using it as a desktop application, as it's intended, instead.

And frankly, it's driving me crazy. I'm continually running into two problems:

First, the show streams from KGO-AM are seriously messed up. Without exception, about half-way through the recording, the first 10 minutes of the show repeats. Sometimes this happens more than once. After the repeated segment, the show picks up where it was before the flashback. It's frustrating, and I've reported the problem to Radiotime (the provider of the streams), but it is exacerbated by Radioshift's interface.

Which is the second problem. Although Radioshift is sometimes described at "TiVo for radio," it really doesn't offer many playback controls at all. There's no "resume playback" feature, so if you stop listening to a show, you can't get back to where you left off. Not only does Radioshift not remember your stopping point, it does not offer any controls for navigating the recording. No rewind. No fast-foward.

But there's an easy workaround that you can use until Rogue Amobea addresses this oversight. Specify QuickTime Player as your "audio editor" in Radioshift's preferences. Then, when you want to listen to a show, click "Edit Audio" to automatically open the recording in QuickTime Player.

This works exceptionally well because QuickTime Player, even without buying QuickTime Pro, provides almost all the playback controls that Radioshift lacks. My favorite is that the fast-forward button, if held down while the audio is playing, allows you to skim ahead and easily skip over commercials.

If you do have QuickTime Pro, you can use the AV Controls to speed up the playback of talk shows. Simply open the AV Controls window, then adjust the Playback Speed setting. I use about 1.5X faster. Then, adjust the Pitch Shift slider until the voices sound normal again. It's really quite amazing and a great time saver.

Finally, don't forget that you can also skip to points in the recording by dragging the playhead. If you want to temporarily mark a point in the recording for later review, use the "I" and "O" keys during playback to set selection markers in the QT window (QT Pro required).

I hope these tips help you get more out of Radioshift. If you have one of your own to share, please leave a comment.

NOTE: This piece is cross-posted from my MacDevCenter blog. If you'd like to read, or add, a comment please go there.