Internet Radio for the Uninitiated
As you probably know by now, I’m a big fan of “gadgets.” When I picture a “gadget” I get the image of some kind of portable device that utilizes technology. I think the first “gadget” that was commonly used was the portable transistor radio, although it was a bit before my time. However, I was present for the revolution of the Walkman, and remember my first one from 1980 that was bulky and heavy. Maybe that’s what initiated my future love for this type of device.
Having been involved with the Internet in one form or another for about 12 years now, I feel a little ashamed about certain parts of it that I have simply not gotten to play with much. IRC is one of those things. Although I did try it out a few times, it just never appealed to me, whereas I took to instant messaging immediately. The other biggie is Internet radio. The one or two times in the past that I listened to it, I was not at all impressed. Historically the problem was poor quality due to lack of bandwidth. Why listen to something that to me sounded like AM quality when I had a perfectly good FM radio to play, let alone my own collection of CD’s?
All of this changed this week. Somehow everything came together this week and it became for me a seminal Week of the Radio! First I read a piece by Meredith about Launchcast Radio, an internet radio service that’s owned by Yahoo! Then I get an early Christmas present of a Grundig shortwave radio. Finally, Treonaughts posted a great article about how to stream Internet radio broadcasts through the Treo using Pocket Tunes.
My radio-listening habits have changed a lot over the years. I didn’t listen to radio that much growing up, preferring the records and cassettes of my parents and then later of my own. Then when I was 16, a classmate gave me a Pink Floyd album and I suddenly became obsessed with classic rock. I became a big listener of “AOR” (Album Oriented Radio) at the time, which in New York City meant 92.3 K-Rock, a station that had just gone on the air – just in time to broadcast the first Bandaid concert live.
When I got to college a couple of years later, my tastes for whatever reason started swinging more towards alternative rock and New Age. In Boston at that time there was a great alternative station called WFNX 101.7, which apparently is still around, and another older station, 104.1 WBCN, that was doing lots of experimenting with different genres including alternative rock, classic rock, and even some rap and R&B. There were also some college stations and MIT had one (88.1 WMBR) that played some really bizarre stuff on Friday and/or Saturday nights. At Boston University, where I was attending college, there was a communications school where I took a few classes (actually I transferred into it for a year when I thought I was going to become a journalist), and their main building also housed the public radio station 90.9 WBUR – where the Click and Clack actually broadcasted from before they moved to Harvard Square. By my senior year, I was listening to a lot of NPR. I thoroughly enjoyed their in-depth coverage over the sensationalized or “dumbed down” reporting that has historically existed in much of commercial mainstream media. While some have accused NPR for being a bit snobby, I still find it to have much better reporting than the alternatives. If the choice is between in-debth and snobby on the one hand and shallow, sensationalistic and dumbed down on the other, I'll have to go with the former...
During college I also listened to a lot of shortwave radio. For those unfamiliar with it, it is a set of frequencies above the normal FM band which are used to communicate programs internationally – you need a specially equipped radio in order to receive these. Stations were primarily state-owned and geared towards those outside of the country. Kind of a PR tool or propaganda if you will. They have pretty horrible sound quality as well, something on par with AM. The U.S. has it’s own shortwave network called Voice Of America. What I listened to during college was primarily Radio Moscow, the Soviet state shortwave radio station. It was fascinating to me because I was generally interested in Russia at the time (I majored in Russia) and the Soviet Union was in the midst of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika and Glasnost’. You could listen to the talk shows and round tables where journalists debated social problems, which was unheard of just a few years earlier. When I first started listening they were still vehement in their stance against the west, but during those years you could tell they were beginning to question even foreign policy issues (particularly their disastrous foray into Afghanistan) and some of the defensiveness was being replaced by honest talk.
After college, I don’t really remember listening to much. I vaguely remember being on a jazz kick briefly when I was working in New York in between college and grad school, but a bad breakup with a girlfriend at the time made me turn towards less soothing stuff and more towards some of the angry alternative stuff from earlier like Throwing Muses. In Grad School (Charlottesville, VA) during the early 1990’s there was a real dearth of good stations. Most of them seemed to be top-40 or Country in genre. When I moved to DC in ‘95 after two and a half years in Charlottesville, I was amazed that my “alternative” radio had become the mainstream. Top-40 stations were now playing Nirvana! I settled on a 99.1 WHFS, which had a rich history in DC as being alternative for something like 20 years, way more than anyone else in the area. But even back then people were saying that it had lost a lot of its character, and I was soon realizing that it too was beginning to sound more like a top-40 channel with tons of commercials and songs that you would hear sometimes half a dozen times per day!
Again I started listening to NPR, and the DC area has a couple of great NPR stations. 88.5 WAMU is a station that is now only talk, although when I was first listening part of the day was taken up with hours of bluegrass music. 90.9 WETA is a combination talk and classical music channel, like a lot of stations that host public radio. I’d always enjoyed classical music. WBUR in Boston played it in addition to its NPR broadcasts. But I was by no means an aficionado. Slowly, listening to WETA, I’ve become more familiar with it over the years and it’s gotten a larger and larger share of my listening time.
Then Satellite Radio came to town. I remember hearing about it on NPR of all places back in 2000 I think and I was really looking forward to it, since I had had some experience with the music channels on Satellite TV. Those Satellite TV channels were a cool idea – I loved the lack of commercials, the great sound quality, and the fact that you could very quickly decide exactly what genre you wanted. Oh, also the fact that each song name and the album it was on and the artist performing it were all on the screen while it played, allowing you to note it down if you really liked the song. At the same time, though, I felt really silly using the TV as a radio. The TV was something to watch, and at the time I shared a TV with two or three other guys in our group house and in general we WERE watching something most of the time. About two years ago, I finally took the plunge and bought an XM radio – a Delphi Skifi - which I could listen to in the car, then bring to the office and listen to it there via a boombox that the module fit into. Having Satellite radio in the car was great for long trips when you don’t know which stations you’re going to be near or can’t quite pick them up. You can always have access to your favorite music or news. Like the Satellite TV music channels, you got the names of the artist and song, although there’s a point at which these would cut off if they were too long. My main problem was that being an NPR junky, the news stations on XM (just audio feeds mainly of various cable news channels like CNN, Fox, etc.), really didn’t do it for me. I felt not having NPR was a huge oversight, but while the competing satellite company has a couple of NPR shows, they are pretty minimal compared to the large collection available on a regular station. When I contacted XM about this, they said that NPR felt if they allowed XM to broadcast their programs, local public stations wouldn’t continue to get the same revenue in donations. So I found that except for the occasional long trip, I really wasn’t using it much in the car. At work I was using it primarily to listen to classical music because that was the least disruptive to those around me – or to myself when trying to do work that required a lot of concentration. So I was paying $11 per month to listen to classical music, which I could have done for free by bringing in a standard radio. So after about a year I finally sold my radio to a friend.
While I generally don’t listen to that much recorded music on CD, MP3, etc. these days, the main thing that HAS taken me away from radio is the audio book. I’ve written about Audible.com a bunch of times here. I subscribed to this service almost five years ago. Being a slow reader makes it all the more attractive – suddenly you are able to use the time which would ordinarily be very difficult if not impossible to read a book (driving, exercising, etc.) With the large number of unabridged books available, you can easily spend huge amounts of time listening. I don’t know what the average book length is, but the ones in my queue run between 4 hours to over 20. I’ve read a good 60 books at least over the years and have at least that number still unread but purchased and waiting in my queue.
So, getting back to the present, as I mentioned, last week Meredith posted about Launchcast Radio and I decided to give it a shot. After playing with it for a few days, I became so enamored with it that I signed up for their paying service called Launchcast Plus. Launchcast combines some of the same ideas that satellite radio does by offering a large number of stations based on genre. However, the way they distinguish themselves is by customizing the music you hear to the individual’s preferences. This entry is becoming extremely long, so I’m going to post some more detailed thoughts about Launchcast in a future entry. Treonaughts posted as well about another type of “broadcasting” technology similar to how Launchcast works. However, Shoutcast streams are streams of MP3 files, and it’s been around for at least 5 years. Because MP3’s can be compressed at different rates, one can provide different streams that vary so that someone on a T1 connection down to someone on a 33.6 modem or even GPRS connection can receive the stream.
The trend towards ubiquitous wireless connectivity will mean more portable devices that can receive this kind of streaming, and so the last remaining problem with this technology will be solved and will eventually supplant the standard FM broadcast, which has gotten increasingly outdated. Delphi’s new MiFi portable XM receiver, while not internet streaming, shows another hint at the future of radio. It contains a small onboard hard drive that allows you to “timeshift” your radio programming, finally bringing a technology that was introduced for TV five years ago via TiVo and ReplayTV. When all these technologies will merge is somewhat unpredictable. While wireless networs were rare 5 years ago, they still have a long way to go to get close to the universal coverage of cell phones, and the fact that you can use them to make telephone calls without subscribing to a phone company means that mobile phone companies in particular will not be making it easy for these networks to take off. At the same time, so many people see the incredible power that this would provide that its inevitable. Already cities like Philidelphia are agreeing to make wifi a freely available public utility, and New York has been asking for proposals from various companies to do set up a high-speed ubiquitous network for some time. At this rate it seems likely that the internet will supplant radio as the main method of communication for audio broadcasting, and probably eventually video as well. Unfortunately the FCC will still be involved, but I’m hoping it will only be to regulate the technical aspect of things so that one wireless network, technology, or hotspot can’t interfere with others. But according to recent statements it sounds like the FCC wants to remake itself into an arbiter for all things that get communicated via the Internet as well. No doubt it sees where things are headed and doesn’t want to lose all the power it currently has to individuals or various technology companies.