I’ve rediscovered Internet radio. At the beginning of the nineties one of the first things I started playing with when Internet began to grow. It wasn’t really what it should be by then over a 24k4 modem, but it was fascinating to listen live to a major league baseball game, or to the Australian ABC.
In Dutch at @ DutchCowboys
Sometimes things went well in DOS, Windows 3.11, ’95, or one of the different tastes of Linux that I’d sometimes more or less successfully got running, but ever so often it didn’t work at all. Listening often meant waiting another minute or two while the box of bolts and nuts had buffered enough bits to produce some more sound, for yet another thirty seconds.
Over the years radio left my digital household. We play with with pics and video, while we had to get used again to the fact that you don’t have to think about too many things because on the iMac Mac iPhoto is running. iPhoto is a video and/or photo database/programme that imports, indexes, en everything else that one should want, has been taken care of by Apple. Great application, but we’re talking radio over here.
Rediscovered thanks to iTunes. While I started with WinAmp some years ago, iTunes became a logical choice, while still on XP, when I bought my first iPod. iTunes is still running on our iMac now, in which we’ve imported over 6000 songs now. Most of them ripped from our own old Cd’s, or bought through a legal web shop, though maybe not in the eyes of BUMA (the Dutch RIAA) . Until the last word about allofmp3 has been spoken, as long as the website is still in the air, I am customer.
iTunes is almost always in shuffle mode, but, even though it’s randomizing 6000 songs, after a while you get the idea you’re listening to a tape you’ve heard before. So, out or boredom, clicked the radio button in iTunes, and browsed some of the available streams.
We’re sold. Listening all day to a great American station, called radioio. Go to their website every two hours, click a button over there, and the next two hours you’re listening commercial free. Becoming a member is also possible, but wait, there are much more stations.
Long live radio.