Tuesday, October 29, 2002

I had a bit of time this morning and have added a few more stations that I've been monitoring recently. Most of them, but not all, are classical and most of these are based in Europe. Antena 2 in Portugal offers a very interesting mix. I'm afraid the commentary is - well - Portuguese to me, but I have found some very interesting music through this channel. Unfortunately their 32kbps WMP stream is all they can host reliably http://www.rdp.pt/antena2/index.html We've visited BBC3 before, but it really is the mother of classical stations. It is too bad they don't support higher quality streams. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/ Another European station, this time from the Netherlands, is de ConcerrtZender. http://www.omroep.nl/concertzender/ I find them somewhat variable in quality and selection, but they are worth a check. The 20kpbs stream is almost unlistenable, so stick with 64kbps if your connection supports it. A Danish classical station can be found at http://www.dr.dk/drklassisk/ Hunting around a bit we find their webcast page which offers a variety of WMP streams and stations. I've only seriously listened to the "DR Klassisk" stream and recommend it. http://www.dr.dk/netradio/#direkte Lorraine - this one is for you! Operadio. Their page begins with Sir Edward Appleton's famous quote" "I do not really mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand." http://www.operadio.com/ Unfortunately to access all eight channels you need to use Windows.. boo! 10:50:36 AM     There is very little in the way of aac coded audio on the Web. If you have Quicktime 6 and want to listen, try this link. http://www.apple.com/quicktime/gallery/aac.html The tools are out there and the quality is much better than mp3 at similar bit rates. CDs encoded at 160kbps sound wonderful on my home stereo. 9:01:14 AM     By popular demand here are a few interesting Internet radio stations. KING-FM in Seattle is another classical radio station worth tuning. It is a bit on the vanilla side and it has a very limited bandwidth/lo-fi stream, but there is quite a bit of music rather than talk. http://www.king.org/ It is still much better than what 99% of the country can receive over the air. KUSC offers a reasonably listenable mp3 stream (where are the 128kbps aac streams?). It is another fine diversion from the streams of words that have overtaken radio. They also offer many of the wonderful NPR music programs. http://www.kusc.org/ KWAX is owned by the University of Oregon and offers a large amount of classical programming. Their large LP library seems to come with folks who are aware of the resource. http://www.uoregon.edu/~kwax/ WREK is Georgia Tech's eclectic station. An interesting feature is that they offer a 128kbps mp3 stream. http://cyberbuzz.gatech.edu/wrek/ Temple University offers a higher bandwidth feed than WREK, but getting a stream is frustrating. In a week of attempts I've only been able to listen twice and only for short times. It strikes me that the real audience is the campus LAN audience. http://www.wrti.org/ Moving up the bandwidth ladder we find a 176 kbps Real stream offered by the University of Tennessee. Impressive, but much of their programming is the standard NPR feed (the size of their stream is overkill for this) and you may want to stick with your local NPR station over a radio. http://wuot.org/ It is impressive to note that in a week of testing I was able to receive the high bandwidth WUOT stream most of the time. WOBC is Oberlin's campus station. Eclectic and we have noted Tom Lopez's show in the past. Sixty four kilobits per second when the wind is blowing right. Oddly enough I've climbed part of their antenna mast, so the comment on the wind blowing right seemed reasonable. http://www.wobc.org/ If you find yourself listening to any of the publicly supported stations, be sure you support them. 5:56:08 AM     Some people claim that multimedia content will make 3G wireless networks fly. Sprint and Verizon currently offer services in my area that range from $1 to $3 a megabyte depending on plan. Realistic maximum data rates seem to be between 40 and 70kbps. Let us give them the benefit of the doubt and claim that 32kbps is reasonable for music (you are probably using earphones rather than the awful little speaker in the cellphone). That works out to 1920kbpm or 240kbytes/m. At the cheapest rate listening to four minutes of music would cost a dollar. Increasing the quality to 160 kbps (the default compression on my iPod) we find that we've run out of net. Assuming they could offer a stream of that size we would find ourselves bankrolling them for $75 an hour at the cheapest rate. I'll stick with my iPod. 5:54:10 AM     A neat iPod trick, by the way, is to save mp3 webcast streams and store them on your iPod for later use. Most of the station reviews I have mentioned were made during my evening walks without radio or net - just the iPod. OS X users should check out iNet Stream Archiver - it does a beautiful job and can handle multiple streams. Cheap shareware with a very responsive developer. http://www.xample.ch/ 5:53:48 AM

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