I pulled a few #radios out of storage yesterday. One of them is a Retekess V115, which has a built-in recorder. I tried it out for a couple of airchecks and discovered some things I didn't know. First, it records in the MPEG Layer *2* format, i.e. MP2, *not* Layer 3 (MP3). It appears this means higher quality at the cost of larger file sizes, though the format is still based on lossy compression. The bitrate is 320 kbps. Another notable thing is that it retains the 13 kHz low-pass audio filter that its predecessor model, the Tivdio V-115, had. This really is not necessary for recording FM radio, which is limited to a 15 kHz top frequency response anyway. For FM airchecks, this is probably OK. I would still prefer to have lossless formats but the Retekess is a good backup for strong local signals. As a radio, it's a bit mediocre, not having the reception performance that other DSP-based radios have. All of this also gave me the excuse to explore support for the MP2 format on various platforms. Most programs that support MP3 also support MP2. The Retekess appends "MP3" to the names of the files it creates, but the programs' decoders automatically figure out the correct format. The only problem I ran into was on Android devices. They don't recognize an "mp2" suffix as a music format, and there appears to be no way of making them do so. So the workaround is to ensure that those files have an "mp3" suffix, and then things work.
It's either this, or talk about politics, which I don't want to do right now.