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I really love listening to and making music.I find a lot of new music I like by listening to radio, streaming radio stations online (e.g di.fm, radiotunes.com, Ministry of Sound Radio, and even local radio stations that stream online like abc.net.au and novanation). The Apple Music Trial was a good way to also find songs but after the free trial was ended I decided to save my money and not keep going and find new music by streaming from free sites online.

As for buying music I buy most of mine from iTunes as I was an early adopter. I've bought a few tracks from Google Play because it's cheaper. I have a large collection of CD's which I've imported into iTunes. I sync my itunes library to an ipod and listen to this and a few radio stations in the car. I also have a few friends that buy me CD's for birthday's and Christmas which I listen to in the car. The CD's in the car sound way better as I only have an FM transmitter in my car. At home I listen to streamed music on my Apple TV or streaming radio stations.

Do you have a music streaming rig?

I really like Clementine as a front-end.

On the back end, I do have a little shoebox ION server with a RAID1 library. But I don't really enjoy maintaining all that myself; I really prefer having streaming music playing from some human-curated feed. http://somafm.com/ has a lot of great streams, as does http://di.fm/ and http://sleepbot.com/ is also quite unique.

I'll occasionally use streamripper to record and m3u tag streams for, uh, time-shifting on the car or subway. It also makes a good icecast proxy, so I can have several clementine players around the house connected to my central box, so the house is just consuming one stream from the site, but I can walk from room to room and have everything playing at just about the same place.

chiptune http://www.di.fm/chiptunes/index.php

Yup. We sometimes had some weird rules like that back in the midwest. But in Silicon Valley, engineers are king. If a manager of mine said that to me now, I'd laugh. If s/he was serious, I'd almost immediately move jobs.

To solve that problem, move somewhere that "gets" programmers (Boston, San Francisco and New York are other good places). After that, I highly recommend catchy, thumpy music without vocals. I listen to the house or progressive channels on Digitally Imported all day, personally.

Well, I listen to http://di.fm/ premium stream on my Windows Mobile phone while driving. It's as simple as going to www.di.fm and selecting mp3, wma, or aac. If you are a premium subscriber, you can login and get your premium options. The thing plays using Windows Media player.

I would expect syncing up a PLS file from Shoutcast would enable similar functionality on the Apple platform.

I can also listen to SiriusXM on my phone. :)

Nobody plays industrial on the "radio", but I listen to a combination of these commercial-free internet stations all day every day at work, for free.

• Digital Gunfire
• Tormented Radio
• RantRadio
• di.fm (FuturePop channel)

And yes, I've bought numerous CD's and Amazon MP3's after hearing tracks from these sites. The last one I bought was MenschDefekt by Massiv In Mensch - it's great for the treadmill ;)

I also bought Troops by Dunkelwerk after hearing "Bastard". It was the only track from the album I'd heard, and I only heard it once, but I thought it was so awesome, I went straight out and ordered the album online.

Rock on, bro. I have to admit I actually care very little about music... I mean I like to listen to it, but don't really go out of my way to look for stuff and learn about bands. So the streaming radio stations like http://somafm.com/ and http://di.fm/ have fit me very well - it's more about the DJ chosing a good selection of things in a particular genre, and I just tune into the stream that suits my mood. I really can't be bothered to manage my own playlists myself.

That said, I have picked up an affinity for some artists in exactly the way you describe from listening to some of the ambient / electronica streams, such as Jon Hopkins, Nathan Fake, and Zero 7. Haven't been able to find much of them in record stores, I guess that means I've managed to pick up an obscure taste in music? Anyway, I'm very happy that there's still some good diversity in the types of streaming radio available on the internet. I really can't stand to listen to any of the popular radio stations in most US metropolitan areas anymore, and even get bored with what I've heard from the somewhat broader selection on satellite radio pretty quickly.

Speaking of Digitally-Imported, remember to check with your foreign friends overseas to see what's interesting. I'm deep into a Ukrainian group ( http://fleurmusic.com/ ) right now, but most of their albums are virtually unobtainable in the US. I'd characterize them as something like a mix of Tori Amos doing Celtic stuff, except (insert "in Soviet Russia" joke here) you need a whole bunch of very talented women to make a successful band (would TaTu be big anywhere if they were independent artists? Well, the whole lesbian act aside).

Finally just want to point out http://sleepbot.com/ as a source of very quirky ambient / background ... sound (most stuff playing there doesn't really qualify as music).

Some stations, such as Digitally Imported ( http://di.fm/ ) allow users to purchase subscriptions for high bitrate streams and no commercials.

Ari has a blog entry about being forced to shut down free streams of di.fm and sky.fm and what you can do to try to avoid it.

Ari has a blog entry about being forced to shut down free streams of di.fm and sky.fm and what you can do to try to avoid it.

What Internet radio stations do you listen to and why?

Digitally Imported is pretty much it

What online artists do you enjoy listening to who release their work free?

The Kahvi Collective are an entire online label, with new releases in an RSS feed for automatic downloading; I've got 6.4GB of high quality ogg / mp3 so far~

I listen to www.di.fm all the time, I love their radio, and I am actually afraid what will happen now.
It's so nice getting to listen to the music you like without having to bother about downloading / converting music etc, and I've been a premium member at di.fm for quite some time.

My initial thought is though, can't they move the internet radio servers out of the US, to countries with a bit more sensible laws?

This isn't pirating (you may technically be able to save the streams but it's not trivial and most non-technical people wouldn't bother), this isn't stealing revenue, this isn't hurting anyone... if anything, it should be helping the sale of music. There must be more people than me who have listened to a tune on internet radio and then went and bought it because it was really good.

For all you people in the US, go to DI.FM and do what it says there... help internet radio!!

So make it a real service. Do some research. Use other people's research. Come up with genre playlists and let people subscribe to them. Find worthwhile podcasts and hire/pay people to make them daily/weekly and let people subscribe to them. Promote hot DJs at hot clubs by letting them come up with weekly playlists and let people subscribe to them. Build playlists from Billboard, Radio & Records, etc. and let people subscribe to them. And, of course, let "regular people" build lists of music and let people subscribe to them. Heck, build playlists based upon my ripped CDs and let me subscribe to them.

This is so right that I just want to scream at the morons in the music business for not getting a system like this set up. The really revolutionary part is that each user can manage sets of subscriptions on their own personal device and they are not limited by a fixed number of "channels" or any other holdovers from the radio days and since each user is paying the same subscriber fee there is more of an incentive to cater to all of the various niches out there since the real cost is in setting up and running the service, but once it is all set up and going there is almost no cost to add additional niche programs, eclectic playlists, and off-beat selections ala the Amazon.com com and Craigslist list based systems. The system would not even need to have only human DJs, it could use AI and have intelligent agent programs making playlists and selections based upon live user feedback, random, shuffle, etc...it is really wide open possibilities. The only explanation that I can think of is that the music execs are either too greedy, too stupid, or both to get this type of system up and running.

In the meantime you might want to check out Digitally Imported and A State of Trance w/Armin Van Buurenfor some of the features that I have described above.

The "Here's our whole catalog--you figure it out" model isn't bringing them in droves because it's too much work. I'm not going to pay $15 per month for access to a mind-numbingly large collection of music. But I might pay that much if the subscription service actually provides a service where I automatically get new music that I might actually want to listen to!

Yes, Yes, Yes! If there are any music industry people reading this then PAY ATTENTION...THIS IS WHAT WE WANT. Sigh, they just don't get it.

So make it a real service. Do some research. Use other people's research. Come up with genre playlists and let people subscribe to them. Find worthwhile podcasts and hire/pay people to make them daily/weekly and let people subscribe to them. Promote hot DJs at hot clubs by letting them come up with weekly playlists and let people subscribe to them. Build playlists from Billboard, Radio & Records, etc. and let people subscribe to them. And, of course, let "regular people" build lists of music and let people subscribe to them. Heck, build playlists based upon my ripped CDs and let me subscribe to them.

This is so right that I just want to scream at the morons in the music business for not getting a system like this set up. The really revolutionary part is that each user can manage sets of subscriptions on their own personal device and they are not limited by a fixed number of "channels" or any other holdovers from the radio days and since each user is paying the same subscriber fee there is more of an incentive to cater to all of the various niches out there since the real cost is in setting up and running the service, but once it is all set up and going there is almost no cost to add additional niche programs, eclectic playlists, and off-beat selections ala the Amazon.com com and Craigslist list based systems. The system would not even need to have only human DJs, it could use AI and have intelligent agent programs making playlists and selections based upon live user feedback, random, shuffle, etc...it is really wide open possibilities. The only explanation that I can think of is that the music execs are either too greedy, too stupid, or both to get this type of system up and running.

In the meantime you might want to check out Digitally Imported and A State of Trance w/Armin Van Buurenfor some of the features that I have described above.

The "Here's our whole catalog--you figure it out" model isn't bringing them in droves because it's too much work. I'm not going to pay $15 per month for access to a mind-numbingly large collection of music. But I might pay that much if the subscription service actually provides a service where I automatically get new music that I might actually want to listen to!

Yes, Yes, Yes! If there are any music industry people reading this then PAY ATTENTION...THIS IS WHAT WE WANT. Sigh, they just don't get it.

You may ask us about why don't we just play unlicensed tracks or make an agreement with artists directly to avoid paying so much. The reality of the business is that it is virtually impossible to micromanage things this way. You'd have to have a world class communication company to be able to track down so many artists or labels, find where who is, who to contact, what forms to sign, talk them into it, etc. Plus you'd be surprised just how much of the non-mainstream music you love so much here is really signed to a label. That's why in theory the law that allows for a blanket license is really convenient - it's just that the rates which were set now are truly hopeless and stifle any kind of competition. What are we supposed to do, wave a flag and and turn into a payola service? Put a banner out that says "hey, whoever pays us the most in advance gets to have his or her track heard on the radio!"? Because that's the only model that is going to work with these rates.

The genre is called "Electronic Dance Music" (often shortened to just "electronic" or "dance", although "electronica" often annoys people). Trance and Techno are sub-genres.

It's all explained here, full of clips of every single sub-genre and sub-sub-genre of electronic music (large-ish flash file warning)

I got modded troll for my above comment, awesome! For that one mod who didn't understand: it was a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek remark - allow me to explain:

Amongst DJs and trainspotters (people who just stare at the DJ and try to find out what tracks I'm playing, not Ewen MacGregor) there's a constant huge genre / sub-genre debate. Techno is actually pretty specific in the sounds and layout of the track. As is house, trance, break beat, drum and bass. They're mostly a 4/4 layout, but you'd be surprised what a little syncopation or different thinking can do for a track.

In each genre there's your good and bad music. It falls under every genre. Then each genre has its sub-genres. But all of these fall under dance / electronic dance music. You get your sweeping synths, annoying vocals and played out sounds that are used over and over again in the same key. You get little variety it seems. Unless you go digging - this was one of the big joys of buying vinyl (and still is for me) to find those different tracks that help round out my DJ set. But to the common person, "they all sound the same, like, Carson would never put this on TRL!"

Anyway, I'm off track a bit - though you can say dance music to anything you can dance to, yeah, I can see from where you might be coming.

EDM Guide - you've probably seen this before, but this shows how banal and trivial differences in genres / sub-genres can be.

You can listen to the track on the Guide to Electronic Music. Press "Techno" then "VGM" at the left and choose track 5.

Then again most everyone else have just left the office so a bit hard to judge. It really does seem block out any office sound though, even when played at low volume.
This program combined with the PXC 300s might be overkill but I'm tempted to buy it nevertheless.
http://www.di.fm/ does also work very well with the 300s.

I too find that a noisy work environment is bad for my concentration as a programmer.
[Now, what am I doing here on /. ... ;) ]

Metal the last musical rennasaince?

http://www.di.fm/edmguide/

Take his sarcastic commentary with a grain of salt, but the actual information is pretty well researched. Major innovations came well after the rise of metal, which actually started forming back in the 70s. Metal is certainly a great genre, a lot of creativity and innovation in it, but it is far from the last renassaince.

Shamelessly copied from http://www.di.fm/edmguide/ when he is describing JPop.

"Is anyone even surprised that this kind of stuff would come from Japan? That whole country is like Bizarro world. They do everything we do, just in a really strange way. It reminds me of that scene in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" where they go near Toontown, and you can see clouds of smoke and yelling and fighting and all sorts of haywire shit happening above the horizon to signify the complete and total lunacy of the place. Japan is just like that. The whole world continuously scratches its head at the far east, then sits back and watches to see what wacky thing the Japanese will do next. I mean, I'm sure the culture is swell once you get past all the incest and pedophilia and giant robots and all, but after that--huh? Japan is super crazy place, 100 PERCENT! Note: there's actually two forms of Jpop. The faster kind which gives the hardiest Dance Dance Revolution masters a run for their money, which is indistinguishable from Eurobeat, and the more bubblegum kind, called Shibuya-kei. You can tell which is which."

It used to be that way for me, download first, check it out - buy if I like, or throw away...

But I've stopped downloading music, once in a while a new good track comes out, but they play it 500 bazillion times in the radio, and soon you are bored with it, so I never get around to download/buy it. In stead I'm moving more and more towards places like http://www.di.fm/.

With movies, well I still download movies, and I probably will keep on doing so. In my eyes the companies have fixed the prices which is illegal, so Ill top it off with something just as illegal (yeah, two wrongs won't make a right, but I can live with it) - and if you don't believe in price fixation, then please, do tell me why some random crap movie (stealth to pick one) costs the exact same amount as, lets say Harry Potter and the Goblet of flame when they hit the stores.

Ohh they do drop in price eventually, but again, it seems to be on a fixed price level all the way.

Internet radio is basically useless without broadband (128kbit mp3s, the standard, cannot be streamed on a 56k connection)

internet video is basically useless without broadband

uploading/downloading is horrible on dial-up, even stuff like windows patches or linux kernal updates can take hours

bittorrent? I don't think so

gaming? out of the question

dial-up is basically only useful for casual browsing and email/IM... You cannot really enjoy the net without it.. I'm glad I have my 10mbit cable connection every second I use it.. then again, I am a power user.

I have the Pandora service and have had mixed results when looking for electronic music. It tends to gravitate towards techno.

If you're looking for electronic music, I recommend the "digitally imported" radio service, related to Ishkur's guide to Electronic music
http://www.di.fm/edmguide/edmguide.html

I like electronic music. I don't know of a single radio station that plays it around the clock, certainly not commercial-free. It's not hard to unleash StreamRipper on a DI station here and there, but satellite radio has several channels I like. If I traveled frequently enough to exhaust my iPod's feeble little 8-hour battery, I might subscribe.

What if people like '50s music, or samba music, or liberal political commentary, or conservative political commentary, or Major League Baseball, and want to listen to their genre of choice on long road trips? Are they "fools"?

Good post, though. You implied that public radio is the only kind of broadcast audio worth listening to, and I've taken that bait.

Why would we alpha-geeks not be paying for our music? The problem is the services suck and are overpriced, I'm happily paying http://di.fm/ $13 a month for really great net radio.

Over 1,000 people are tuned into the most listened to 24/7 fully licensed hardcore station in the world!! :D

Previous record was 954, now we have 1,054. Thankyou to all those people who have been (and will be) tuning in :)

Let's try and break 1,100 listeners or more. Together we can surely do it! ;)

DJ Silver is playing *LIVE* from Japan and going *way* overtime now. More than an hour extra so far..

Listen in from http://www.di.fm/mp3/hardcore96k.pls each Wednesday. More details can be found out at http://www.HappyHardcore.com or http://www.DI.fm !!

Over 1,000 people are tuned into the most listened to 24/7 fully licensed hardcore station in the world!! :D

Previous record was 954, now we have 1,054. Thankyou to all those people who have been (and will be) tuning in :)

Let's try and break 1,100 listeners or more. Together we can surely do it! ;)

DJ Silver is playing *LIVE* from Japan and going *way* overtime now. More than an hour extra so far..

Listen in from http://www.di.fm/mp3/hardcore96k.pls each Wednesday. More details can be found out at http://www.HappyHardcore.com or http://www.DI.fm !!

Nearly 1000 people listening to the biggest hardcore radio station in the world!! :D

DJ Silver is playing *LIVE* from Japan and going overtime now.

Listen in from http://www.di.fm/mp3/hardcore96k.pls http://www.DI.fm or http://www.HappyHardcore.com !!

Nearly 1000 people listening to the biggest hardcore radio station in the world!! :D

DJ Silver is playing *LIVE* from Japan and going overtime now.

Listen in from http://www.di.fm/mp3/hardcore96k.pls http://www.DI.fm or http://www.HappyHardcore.com !!

Just over 900 listeners at the moment.

DJ Silver is playing *LIVE* from Japan and going overtime now.

Listen in from http://www.di.fm/mp3/hardcore96k.pls

http://www.DI.fm or http://www.HappyHardcore.com !!

Just over 900 listeners at the moment.

DJ Silver is playing *LIVE* from Japan and going overtime now.

Listen in from http://www.di.fm/mp3/hardcore96k.pls

http://www.DI.fm or http://www.HappyHardcore.com !!

Ishkur made a great site showing a wide scope of different electronic genres. He has a history of electronic instruments, too. http://www.di.fm/edmguide/edmguide.html

The Real History

While I am no real expert on electronic music, I WAS in the rave scene for quite some time, and I don't mean as a kandy kid who just went to roll. I went for the music, and I can honestly say you will see some of the most innovative stuff in the rave scene. That is where the underground is.

Now as for styles, I recommend EVERYBODY check out Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. It gives an EXTREMELY comprehensive look at the different genres that exist, and even for someone as myself who thought I was familiar with them, I still found tons I never heard of. Plus, they give lots of samples of famous/definitive songs for each genre.

Personally, I think drum and bass is the next type of music that will go mainstream. We're already starting to see it happen as some of the more common beat samples get worked into some pop songs or trance songs, and I've also noticed quite a bit of it in commercials as well. So definitely going to say drum and bass, or possibly 2-step, since its really just R&B and hiphop with the 2-step beat, which will let it gain popularity quickly in the hip-hop scene which in turn seems to be whats affecting the mainstream nowadays.

Let me hit you up with some knowledge.

This is one of my favourite web sites on the Internet. Ishkur is super awesome.

Ishkur's guide to electronic music recently added a funny but informative little section about the history of electronic music.

The page has samples from dozens of different genres, so if you've ever wondered about the difference between goa and psy-trance, it'll help you figure it out too.

That's right. It's been around for 65,000 years!

I listen to Digitally Imported Radio (DI) every day. In fact, since I have something always available I rarely download music anymore. It's simply more convienent to just tune in than it is to go searching for what I'm interested in.

I occasionally listen to the music streams from http://www.di.fm/. Since I have a 64kbps connection, I usually choose the low bit rate 24kbps Winamp stream or the 20kbps Windows Media stream.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that they switched to aac+ for Winamp and the quality difference was simply astounding. I wouldn't believe it was 24kbps, I thought they had a 96kbps stream in there or higher.

i'd love to see today's kids pull off something underground. "Hey let's set up an elite MSN chat room and trade WMV files!" ... "yah! wow this will be just like in the movie hackers!" ... "hold on let me turn up some techno... "send me over the_swan_episode_3.wmv!" ... "hey is that filename Unicode? iTunes is havin problems adding it to the playlist" ... "This is the MSN Passport police, we have forwarded your logs to the MPAA"

Fuck the 'industry' and the horse it rode in on. Music is about people.

I'm glad to see someone exercising discretion in their purchasing; but do you really benefit from rejecting art because you object to the way the medium is produced?

For once in ages I do actually agree with the comments of an AC. Everything that I listen to comes from Proton Radio, Bassdrive, and Di. The major media industry simply doesn't have anything worth listening to/downloading anymore.

but slack off on the second part (don't break the law by downloading them anyway).

Everything that I listen to comes from Proton Radio, Bassdrive, and Di. The major media industry simply doesn't have anything worth listening to/downloading anymore.

But, at the same time, I do advocate civil disobedience as a proper means of fighting laws. Sure, some people get nailed. I think even Martin Luther King spent time in jail.

If I busy sorting through my collection, I'd be streaming from digitally imported right now. Techno never gets old. I shell out 9 bucks and am considering shelling out more because I want to support di.

As well as Digitally Imported for some nice streaming electronica.

It's my concentration music of choice. Non-vocal if I have a difficult problem to solve or a marathon under the gun deadline, vocal if I'm just relaxing. Digitally Imported is the best streaming site on the net. 8)

I think the parent poster was referring to www.di.fm, not FM radio. RDS only applies to over-the-air FM radio broadcasts.

For DI.FM's MP# streams, it would be ID3.