As an online dj, I have been trying to get the word out about internet radio for a long time. Many people know there is internet radio, but some people don’t realize how awesome it really is.
To some people, internet radio is AOL Radio, Yahoo Radio, Pandora, and all the other sites like those. Well that’s all well and good, but to me this isn’t ‘real internet radio.’ Tons and tons of work is put into ‘real internet radio stations.’
Internet radio stations can be found on most popular media players such as Windows Media Player, Winamp, and iTunes. iTunes and Windows Media Player have an index of online radio stations that are selected by a ‘real human’ rather than a robot. This means that most of their indexed stations are high quality and well programed. Other programs like Winamp grab internet radio stations from sites like ShoutCast.
If you have ever listened to a station online and thought “wow this station sounds horrible.” well some stations broadcast at a low bitrate. Bitrates for internet radio stations normally only broadcast at kilobytes per second (kbps). The higher the number, the higher the quality. 128 kbps is typically the highest quality, 64 kbps being the middle, and 32 kbps being the lowest. Some talk stations have been known to broadcast as low as 16 kbps. If you have a slow internet connection you will want to listen to the lower bitrate ations and if you have really fast internet, you want to listen to the higher bitrates. Next time you listen to a station, look carefully at the bitrate!
Many stations are not well programed. Many of your local FM stations broadcast online. The down side on most of these statuibs, is that they broadcast at very low bitrates and tend to have many short commercial breaks or occasional long commercial breaks. That’s no good. Most internet only radio stations have little to no commercials. Also, some stations such as FLY 104.9 have a staff member called a program director who manually chooses each song every day to garuntee a perfect rotation of music. Some stations have an automation program that choses music randomly and sometimes they have a bad rotation. It is sometimes difficult to find the internet radio station with the perfect rotation.
So next time you are planning to tune into a radio station online you know what to look for!