Myine Abbee Music System -- Radio In, Commercials Out
The Myine Abbee is a commercial-free music system, recording your favorite radio stations and automatically filtering out the annoying DJ talk and commercials. It’s kind of like a TiVO for your radio, with the same automatic advantages. We’ve been interested in this product since we heard it was a 2010 CES award winner and considering how well it seems to filter out content, we’d agree it’s got something special- though it might not be for everyone.
If you listen to the radio at all, you’re probably tired of the endless pitches for as-heard-on-radio junk, not to mention the incessant DJ chatter. The Myine Abbee comes with a home speaker system and FM tuner that allows you to play the recorded content in your home, minus the junk. It also comes with a portable player designed to play in the car, on the go, or plug into other devices.
The learning curve on the device was a few days, but once it gets working, it’s scarily accurate at filtering out commercials. Of course, commercials are usually fairly easy to identify, often being somewhat louder than the music — a very good reason to filter them out. It took us a while to figure out radio stations we wanted to listen to, however, since many of us use our music players, XM, or Pandora for our music needs. One of us did listen to radio — NPR, actually — but this music system is meant to work with music radio specifically.
The portable music player itself isn’t bad. The home speaker system had surprisingly decent quality speakers considering its main emphasis seemed to be portability, which typically results in compromises. They advertise the system holds 500 songs and while your iPod may be carrying around more than that, we didn’t reach nearly that number when testing device, so it seems like plenty of space. The smart “refreshing” system helps make 500 a very reasonable limit, though in the age where a few gigs is commonplace, it’s still a bit on the small side. You can also easily lock songs so that they are not automatically deleted.
The Abbee seems like it would have been the perfect gift for me as a high schooler, when I was listening non-stop to the radio and sometimes recording the good hours of continuous content for when the programming was a little lackluster. The Truly Obscure staff is not very tuned in to what the average high school student is like any more, though we suspect something about musicals and likely unsuitable volumes. Someone suggested it was very useful for certain types of offices, especially dental or medical offices where some variety in music is necessary to break up the monotony but all music has to be safe for general public consumption (radio-friendly).
One of the major features I would like is cross-compatibility. It doesn’t hook up to the Internet and comes with its own player. Instead of having an additional player, I would just like to use my portable music player with it, and it would be even better if it paired up easily with the Myine Ira that we previously reviewed. Also, we should note that it doesn’t work with the AM band, only FM stations. Nonetheless, the Myine Abbee is great at what it does for a very niche market.
Available for $249.99 on the Myine site or through Amazon
