Internet radio

[bald marauder]

Following on from the forum threads about 'what ED is listening to' (surely this thread should be lounged?) I'm interested in who uses the internet to get their sounds?

I use it quite a lot (often all day at work, and sometimes in the evenings at home) and apart from when I'm driving never now use 'normal' radio.

Favourite channels at the moment: Bossa Nova breakfast, Sky Classical, Folk Alley and especially Radio David Byrne. Check out his current playlist (http://www.davidbyrne.com/radio/) which changes every month, and there's even some arcade fire on it at the moment (which i seem to remember being mentioned on the other - soon to be lounged? - thread).

Anyone else use internet radio? What's your favourite?

[Mark]

It's got to be KCRW, just check out the Morning becomes Eclectic archive (including filmed sessions), there's enough there to keep you going for a while, if not longer

(OK, I know it's Santa Monica based subscriber supported radio but I listen to it over the internet)

[mockney piers]

I've about 30 GB (4,500 songs, I rip big to squeeze every drop of quality out of the travesty that is MP3) of ripped music (all from my own CDs) on my work PC, so I rarely need to venture out on t'internet.

Plus the bandwidth hogging doesn't go down too well with the support team. But there are good sites like shoutcast, the BBC, yahoo et al.

[bald marauder]

Hey Mockney,

Have you tried ripping in uncompressed format - apple lossless (or FLAC on PC's) for example? It sounds one hell of a lot better than MP3....

[mockney piers]

I don't think we're allowed any appley stuff on our work PCs so I just use audiograbber and a LAME encoder, at home I use Sony's *ahem* eccentric Connect software and rip to ATRAC3. The results are pretty good as it goes, but it still sounds a little dead.

As it goes I'm thinking of getting back into vinyl after popping round a neighbour's house (the chap is one half of Spooky, if you remember them) and he played A Kind of Blue on his turn-table. Reminded me what a quality format vinyl is!

You won't hear aound like that on t'internet radio that's for certain.

[ben]

If you like KCRW then take a listen to WFMU

[louisiana]

I've been ripping to Apple Lossless for a couple of years (on PC - yes, it works there to), but am seriously wondering whether to start again with a non-proprietary format. Don't want my entire music collection to be hostage to one company. The only thing that's been stopping me is that FLAC won't work with iTunes, so may have to throw iTunes out and try to find other software to run the Pods. (I also use iTunes to feed a wireless squeezebox to the hi-fi, but that's just an unnecessary additional step.) And just haven't got around to that.

Lossless does sound a lot better than MP3, although encoding MP3s at 320 kbps does narrow down the difference *a lot*.

There are some good podcasts out there - for example, for those into dance/electronica, the Resident Advisor one-hour DJ podcasts.

Any Last.fm users here?

Louisiana

[Ant]

I use last.fm from time to time, but haven't really been bothering to scrobble stuff up lately. (What a stupid word that is, scrobble.) I'm frunt over there, if you want to rummage through what I was listening to a little while ago.