9/22/09 Tech Tuesday on Internet Radio Roundup

Internet Radio Round-up -

I am frequently asked about Internet radio, how it works and for the best websites to retrieve this content.

Streaming audio / Internet radio has been around for almost a decade and has greatly improved over the years. At first it sounded like muffled AM radio, was unreliable and little more than a novelty for high-tech enthusiasts. Today's Internet radio stations are often broadcast in CD quality or better, there are thousands to choose from and many websites are dedicated to keeping track of the audio feeds and making them accessible to users.

In this segment I would like to go over my top 3 picks for Internet radio stations and demonstrate how to use them.

1) Shoutcast.com
Shoutcast.com was originally made to inventory broadcast audio feeds that use the shoutcast server. There are now thousands of feeds, everything from people broadcasting in their basement to well known radio stations from all over the world. Nullsoft, the maker of the shoutcast server also makes the winamp player, a lightweight piece of software that works best with these feeds.

2) Grooveshark.com
Grooveshark is a web based on-line music search engine, music streaming service and music recommendation service. You can search for an audio stream and upload music to be played on demand or to a play list. Songs can be tweeted to your twitter account while you're listening to them and the service can make recommendations based on what you're listening to.

Grooveshark streams 50 to 60 million songs per month, to more than 400,000 users. As of April 2009, its audience is growing at a rate of 2 to 3% per day.

3) Pandora.com
Pandora.com is a result of the music genome project, an attempt to "capture the essence of music at the fundamental level" using almost 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them.

The site site allows you to pick and artist or title of you choice and then builds a personalized play list of music similar to it. You can not only use Pandora on your computer, but is integrated with many blu-ray players and can be used on the iPhone. It's by far one of the most versatile sources of Internet music available.

Conclusion
Internet radio is a great source of music, can introduce you to new things and best of all, it's free. You might be surprised at what you find.

Attila Seress

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Pandora
• Grooveshark
• Shoutcast
• Attila
• Seress
• Tech
• Tuesday