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Does this mean that we'll get some decent radio stations back? Clear Channel effectively ruined the radio for me, NPR being the only remaining reason to turn it on.

Well, for me that would be Democracy Now!, which you can may be able to hear broadcast somewhere, depending on where you live, e.g. KPFA, in the SF Bay Area, and WBAI in the New York area. In general, the Pacifica stations do a decent job of "alternative" broadcasting, provided you don't mind the almost exclusively left-wing focus.

Also, there are many, many small college stations (and other non-coms) scattered around, usually located at the bottom of the dial. They also all have internet streams these days:

• KZSU
• KFJC
• WFMU
• WREK
• WRCT
• KALX
• KUSF
• WNUR
• KSPC
• KXLU
• WPRB
• KTRU
• KALW

For me, it's not the AM/FM limitations so much... It's just the suckiness of the music. If you set this thing up to record each unique song played in a 24 hour period on one particular station, you'd have just 20 different songs. Radio plays the same songs over and over again. Once you've recorded one days' worth of broadcasting, you'd be set for the next month... or whenever the radio station refreshes their playlist.

Your only exaggerating a little bit, but you're essentially describing only commercial radio. In many places around the country there are alternatives to that, college radio stations and non-profits like the Pacifica stations, and you'll hear a wide variety of stuff broadcast there.

Of course, they also all tend to have some form of internet streaming going, so this by itself would not be a reason to do capture of FM signals (possibly you might like to do this to get higher audio quality and to reduce bandwith usage).

It is, by the way, an odd peculiarity about all the buzz about "podcasting" making radio broadcasting more democratic: when I actually listen to amateurs playing DJ, it seems really unimpressive... college stations on the other hand, have something of a tradition of exploration of new music to fall back on, they're pros at the business of being amateurs.

A quick list of stations that might be worth a listen:

• WRCT
• KZSU
• KALX
• KUSF
• KFJC
• WNUR
• WREK
• WFMU
• KSPC
• KXLU
• WPRB
• KTRU

Can you say 91.7 KTRU (Rice University), 90.1 KPFT (Pacifica), or 88.7 KUHF (NPR, classical)? All good noncommercial Houston radio.

I worried time marched on and left me uncool, but it seems they've just abandoned the venerable KCMU for the more "edgy" KEXP. I find it hard to believe they're that much more 'freeform' or 'experimental' than they ever were, which is to say in the upper quartile of college radio stations. I just hope state of Washington taxpayers didn't pay for a call-letter change.

I just wrapped up my late night at KTRU which is certainly the peer of many of the stations mentioned here. I believe we generally sound better than most college stations, since the 50K watts tend to keep us from doing anything too dumb.

If you live in houston, ktru (fm 91.7) is pretty decent. If you don't, KTRU has a radio stream.

One thing that lots of the places seemed to bitch about was the tracking of the listeners. Now, I know that they wanted it to be retroactive to the DMCA and that's just stupid, but from say now on, what's the big deal? Can't a log parser do this in no time? Just track unique hosts or something like that. If they just needed numbers it should be a no brainer, even something like webalizer can give you those numbers if you set it up right.

We play an eclectic range of material -- much of which comes in the mail, unsolicited, directly from the artist, and some of which is brought in by the DJs. We have no sort of centralized tracking system for our 10,000+ records/CDs... many of which were never actually published through traditional channels, and hence can't easily be cataloged according to the CARP recomendations.

To even begin to comply, we would have to locate and key in information for each and every one of those albums. Then, we'd have to track what's played -- but as we're not a top-40s station with a small playlist, individual DJs have quite a free hand in choosing what they play, and we're only now beginning to move from pencil and paper to a computerized database to record track titles and artist names; even that is fraught with problems.

To comply with the law as proposed, our only option would be to stop streaming while we tried to pay someone to implement all of the above -- which likely would never happen, and we'd lose literally thousands of regular listeners.

core is interesting, but the COOLEST is

cat /dev/hda1 > /dev/audio

seriously, sometime i'm going to tape about half an hour of my LinuxPPC partition, drive it down to the local college radio station, and ask them to play it during the ambient music show.. :)
/dev/hda1 (or your corresponding equivilent) is great, though, especially if you come across any _sound files_ on your drive saved in a lossless format-- they just play at random and then disappear back into the soup.

and, for the record, you _can_ make some pretty interesting stuff just by writing very simple programs.

unsigned char n=0; /* this will result in some wierd rollover problems, which are left intentionally unfixed. to fix them, change to an int and typedef to unsigned char when you cout */
char i = 1
for(;;) {
cout << (n+=i);
if (n>=255) i=-(i+1);
if (n=0) i=-(i-1);
if (i==0) i++;
}

I don't have physical access to a linux box with sound right now and i haven't compiled the program above [it was just the first example i could think of off the top of my head], so i don't know what it sounds like, but messing with that kind of pattern can give you some really trippy shit.

Or find some large databaselike data files with a lot of repetitive structure but varying information interspersed, and you get something that vaguely approaches the quality level of Coil.. :)

Can ANY non-unixlike operating systems claim that they come with a built-in industrial music generator? :)

Most radio stations do not play songs of of cd's. The station I work for does (KTRU, 91.7 Houston, TX), and yes if you call us we will play any song off of the cd so long as we have the cd in the station (and yes, this is an "educational" station so we play a lot of offbeat music rather then mainstream). Most radio stations put the single or singles on to something caled a cassette that looks nothing like a cassette tape, looking more like an 8 track then anything else.

Then again most people calling radio stations don't want to hear anything but the single anyway.

--MikeOC (aka Quincy[WRC])

Not well said

No longer is music made for music's sake. (I realise that this is a naive view, but bear with me here, I'm a makin' a point.) It is made with the singular purpose of selling as many possible records within a very short amount of time.

As a DJ at a college radio station, KTRU I have to strongly disagree with your statement that music is no longer made for music's sake. If you stick to the realm of commercial radio stations I might agree with you, but even then have a hard time agreeing. There are many mainstream bands out there who have "made it" and could care less. They are making music because it is what they want to do. Many artists may dream of "making it," but most of them don't and continue to publish and perform music reguardless.

Now as you extend in to other realms of music outside the world of commercial radio, word music, scordatura, avant-garde jazz, and many of the other things I feature on my shift you will find scores of artists who perform for the sake of music. I am good friends with many of the members of bands that I play and can tell you that their genuine interest is in expressig themselves through their music.

Don't extend the views of a small portion of the music industry to the industry as a whole. There are easily 1000 times more performers who perform for the love of music then performers who do it for the money.

--MikeOC (aka Quincy)

"Oomp omp went the little green frog..."

Oh, and if you want to follow the above link to the radio station web site you can listen to my shift Tuesday morning from 7 - 9 am. We broadcast over Real Audio in addition to the airwaves. I give out the station number over the air and would be more then happy to continue this converstaion from there.