Consider that most of the memory being used for buffering mp3's is NOT being used when in tuner mode, how difficult would it be to buffer the radio signal when you hit pause? (snip) Radio isn't known for high fidelity, so you could apply a pretty mean compression ratio to the signal, and buffer several minutes of radio in RAM alone...

You're talking about compressing it in real time, though, while also doing whatever else needs to be done to play the buffer from memory (for consistency, you have to be playing the compressed version through the speakers, otherwise you'll have differences in sound quality between "rewound" sound and normal sound, and switching between them will be bizarre). While it would certainly compress well, I don't know that it's doable to compress it in real time - and I'd assume that the uncompressed signal, which has to be stored somewhere if it's not being compressed in real time, isn't small.

Heck, if a tivo with it's underpowered arm can do it with video, surely the empeg could hit audio?

TiVo uses a PowerPC - the original TiVo's speed is 54MHz, and the DirecTV/TiVo combo unit's speed is faster (something like 85MHz). But TiVo also has dedicated MPEG encoding/decoding hardware, which the Empeg (by design) does not. Essentially the only things the processor on a TiVo does are deal with program guide information and maintain the user interface.

I don't think this type of thing is really feasible with the current Empeg hardware. Though of course, I'd love to be proven wrong - this type of functionality would be excellent.

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Daniel M. Zimmerman, Caltech Computer Science
Mk.2 #060000058, 36GB
Mk.1 #00101, 10GB