Internet Radio
By Ian Urie
Nowadays
when I use my computer, I tend to listen to "radio" at the same time.
This is actually quite a change from my humble beginnings in computing.
In those days, you used a computer for a specific purpose.
This could be for games, word processing, printing, picture editing,
even for that new fangled Internet thingy.
In many ways we still use the computer for the same things albeit with
subtle changes.
Pictures would be loaded onto the computer via a floppy disk, not via a USB
lead or firewire, or even scanned in.
Of course, scanners were for the super rich, most had hand scanners
(one you held yourself and run over the picture)
Games again , if you had a hard drive, could be run straight from the
computer without all those long loading times.
It's a wonder we ever got to the stage we have now.
Even in the last couple of years, internet radio was a luxury.
Bandwidth was precious, especially in the days before broadband became
commonplace.
Nowadays, most have the option of a connection (theoretically) capable
of 8mb/s.
Therefore radio is now something that can be used without affecting
your connection loading.
The likes of Winamp, Media player, Realplayer et al have radio stations
galore with varying bandwidth requirements.
With the music industry now fragmented into more and more sub genres,
you can get a station that will cater to your style of music,
regardless of how avante garde or retro it is.
One of my favourites, at present is PlayRock UK, which plays rock and
metal from the sixties up to the present day.
Clicking on the picture will take you there (as usual).
As seen, most stations now have front ends like this to make their
service as accessible as possible.
They will provide .pls files to aid your music player of choice to load
the station.
If rock isn't your favourite, you could do worse than look at the page
before..........
This has their entire stable of stations, and even a link to listen
from your mobile.
See, how things have moved on?
If you're working on your computer , why not listen to radio and
discover some new music?
