Online Radio

I got hooked on online radio when I worked at my old job. I listened to Five Live. Their after noon show played at the same time as my early morning. Evening shows are typically more relaxed and easy going in my experience. That was nice. I don't need someone yelling in my ear and forcing a laugh every minute to wake me up and get my day going. I need useful news and sane people talking to interesting people. I need something that helps me think, not dull my senses.

I work in software development and we are many layers separated from the internet. This is normal for software development. Thus, I have no access to online radio. This is the problem with podcasts. The idea behind podcasts is you can download them and put them on your portable device. You then take your device with you and listen to the podcasts on the run. This is problematic because devices are increasingly on the internet while on the run. Thus, no need for podcasts. The pressure is off for people to make a podcast and just output the live stream. This also solves some of the DRM troubles for the product owners. They are all for this coming change.

This screws me and my coworkers. We work in a place where normal radio reception sucks anyway. Radio sucks these days, but that is another blog entry. Right now we have a dab of music out there to listen to.  I must listen to news for some reason. Apparently, some other folks want to do the same.

We have all boiled down to the same software package called streamripper. On Linux, it is all command line with a ton of parameters. This means it can be easily atomized. On Windows apparently there is a GUI that requires user intervention that means it is a nightmare to automate. I have only gotten it to download like five minutes of a stream last night and gave up because  of frustrations listed in detail below. It shows promise. Adam attempted to use it to download huge swaths of online radio in one big file and had problems. He is using the windows version. It looks like both versions will let you capture slices based on seconds and just slap them in a folder with a number at the end. Apparently if the software has any kind of connection trouble it just dies. This makes the automation a bit more complex.

You can't get to most raw streams any more. Radio stations and other companies seem to use flash for the most part in order to force people to open the little window that displays ads for the radio station.  Thing is, even the BBC is doing it and they are not a commercial entity. It is just the way things are being done. That is interesting because the portable internet devices mentioned above for the most part do not run flash. The streams of audio and video have to get on to those devices somehow. If you can do it with a hand held device, then you can get it on a computer. It has got to be a matter of playing with it and googling the correct terms.

There is something psychological going on with online radio. It makes people at my work feel better hearing new music all the time. Only some of the streams will be news. There are many young folks up here and listening to the same songs, or even their own collection every day drives them nuts. It drives me nuts too. I think that is the real reason I listen to new so much. I'm sick of music all sounding the same. That's another blog entry too.