5.15.2011

Entertaining Your Earphones


One of the most fulfilling and entertaining ways to digest music through your computer or data enabled mobile device is through online radio.  Now I don't mean just digitally piping in local stations, because what's the new experience in that? The only beneficial aspect of listening to local stations online, is if it is a station from another city, and of music you wouldn't otherwise be privy to.  Some good websites to aide in such an endeavor to check out for such a media experience would be iheartradio.com and tunein.com

The other ways to find music are online streaming services, either prersonalized or genre specific. The most popular of the personalized services in America seems to be Pandora, but I don't prefer it due to the limits on skips and the  frequent commercials for the free subscription, as well as it seems to lean much more mainstream in its choices for you, which can be redundant and boring. The other big player in that arena is Last.fm which I do prefer for all the reasons I don't care much for Pandora. Last.fm has a desktop player they call a "scrobbler" that works well, as well as a plugin for many other players.  You have unlimited skips and there's no commercials for free desktop streaming (yet..). And most importantly they don't mainly play overly popularized bands, but frequently bring you to new and lesser known-up-and coming bands for whatever type of station your listening to, which is great, because isn't variety the spice of life? Another plus for me is they have a free app on Xbox Live. One knock against Last.fm is the mobile player went subscription only about a month ago.  Their subscription is cheap at only $3 a month, but still, I could handle a commercial every so often for free mobile streaming. 

Last but not least, genre specific type of streaming. The two that I turn to are Shoutcast and 8tracks.  Shoutcast has thousands of online radio stations made by companies to just regular people that cover a variety of genres and playlists. Shoutcast stations can be streamed from the browser, Winamp or from a mobile device app. And finally, the little gem known as 8tracks. You know the concept of mix tapes (or CD's depending on your age). Well 8tracks is a community of 'wanna be' DJ's making varied mixes for your enjoyment. The site has a clean interface and a growing supply of apps as fans help by making their own and sharing. My personal favorite is the full-screen player Chrome extension that pipes in pictures from Last.fm, very entertaining to play on a second computer or monitor. 

So do your earphones a favor and mix up your listening a bit. 

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