Slashdot Mirror

Try Soma FM's SF 10-33 station. Or Mission Control.

They've been doing it for a while.

Try Soma FM's SF 10-33 station. Or Mission Control.

They've been doing it for a while.

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.

For similar genres I'd recommend Soma FM. Also thanks to the editors for correcting the spelling of paean.

Simply tune in to any one of the many ambient stations on SomaFM.

I've no connection with SomaFM other than being a very happy customer. They're advert-free and listener-supported, so if you do listen and like what you hear, toss them the $20 you would have spent on this CD!

Simply tune in to any one of the many ambient stations on SomaFM.

I've no connection with SomaFM other than being a very happy customer. They're advert-free and listener-supported, so if you do listen and like what you hear, toss them the $20 you would have spent on this CD!

Simply tune in to any one of the many ambient stations on SomaFM.

I've no connection with SomaFM other than being a very happy customer. They're advert-free and listener-supported, so if you do listen and like what you hear, toss them the $20 you would have spent on this CD!

Simply tune in to any one of the many ambient stations on SomaFM.

I've no connection with SomaFM other than being a very happy customer. They're advert-free and listener-supported, so if you do listen and like what you hear, toss them the $20 you would have spent on this CD!

Simply tune in to any one of the many ambient stations on SomaFM.

I've no connection with SomaFM other than being a very happy customer. They're advert-free and listener-supported, so if you do listen and like what you hear, toss them the $20 you would have spent on this CD!

eh, I find my own favorite music too distracting, then I start thinking about other stuff and skipping forwards and messing with the playlist. So I find it the least effort to just have a good internet radio stream going on in the background.

Most of them I discovered here on Slashdot, even.

Groove Salad on http://somafm.com/ (many other streams there worth trying too, most of my favorite songs are from Lush, but GS is the best coding stream)

Sleepbot on http://sleepbot.com/ for a wide variety of background ambience that's not necessessarily music

Nectarine http://scenemusic.net/ for video game / tracker stuff

Those are my go-to options for keeping my tempo up through the long nights.

Meh, I get that when I start hyperventilating. You should just have your blood pressure checked.

I kinda thought that I didn't like music either, then some slashdot post recommended one of the streams at http://somafm.com/ . Since then I've actually spent some money on an album or two. Though I still don't have an "entertainment" budget set aside to speak of.

Also want to put in a plug for http://sleepbot.com/ambience/b... , which is generally "not music", at least not as you know it.

http://somafm.com/

Poptron!

http://sfstream1.somafm.com:2204/

It's free, but I donate $4.20/mo because 420.

I use streamtuner + streamripper + audacious . Mostly listen to streams from http://somafm.com/ , because I otherwise don't like music enough to bother creating my own playlist / collection. Streamripper saves the stream to a big directory, so I can time-shift it into the car / subway later, while proxying the stream to audacious.

Every once in a while I'll drop them a donation, and buy a few tracks that I really like on Amazon. Which is much more than the music industry would get from me if I didn't listen to music at all... it has that weird effect, the more you hear a song, the more you want it.

Meh, I try to walk the walk. I think it would be a better system to reward the artists based on whether you want them to spend time producing more works, and not so much by allowing them to control distribution of their previous performances. Broad redistribution leads to more mindshare & cultural penetration. That kind of thing usually drives my purchasing decisions these days much more than the marketing machine or pay-to-play "exposure". So I can see why this SOPA thing has kinda become some kind of struggle between traditional media and the "new" "social" media companies.

Actually, it's quite the opposite now... I actively tune out of "popular" crap I hear on the radio and see TV/news ads for. I had actually thought I simply wasn't into music until I discovered some of the stations at http://somafm.com/ that I had seen mentioned in a /. post. And as much as it pains me to say it, the only thing that gets me interested in a book or movie these days is if I hear my friends or co-workers talk about a particular title IRL, on IRC, or god forbid, on Facebook/Twitter or one of those other "social media" things that I occasionally scan. All the more reason to threaten traditional media.

My "entertainment" budget is relatively fixed, and is relatively closer to zero than any of our other expenses, so anything anyone could actually tickle out of me is just bonus.

I have not been to a movie theater in years. OK, we went to see Avatar some time ago when it came out, but that was only because the in-laws insisted, and even then only because they also took the kids for a few hours so we could go. But again that leads back to social pressures trumping carefully orchestrated hype :-P

I'm not really sure what the point of rewarding the publishers for performances is. Lawyers like having pieces of paper that they can use to tell other people to pay them money, I guess. I don't really see what connection that has to productivity, and don't really see any solution to these kinds of "royalties" other than the same way we dealt with imperialist royalties in colonial times anyway, and even in those days the accepted answer was acts of revolt and piracy that we basically founded our country upon. Even those pirates are seldom vilified these days, and even seem to have paid their sailors well and equitably compared to the slave wages of the imperial navies and merchant mariners. I really have no problem challenging the way we currently deal with copyright and intellectual property models.

I do want to expose my children to the original Star Wars movies, if only so they can get the pervasive cultural references. But Lucasfilm is one of the studios coming down harder on IP issues, so it seems a bit of a pain to find. So you know what? My kids are growing up with more exposure to Star Trek, Firefly, Farscape, etc. instead, which is far more readily accessible from Hulu and Netflix. They'll grow up thinking Star Wars was just the premise behind some crap cartoon and not one or two relatively brilliant B-movies for their day.

I had my former iTunes account broken into a few times in a row a little less than a year ago, myself. Thankfully, I only ever used it with gift cards and so only lost iTunes store credit (which was refunded each time anyway). For reference, I use the program along with an old 5th gen. iPod video and a hand-me-down iPhone 3G, non-jailbroken.

My original password and both following passwords were unique to my iTunes account, 14 characters long, and consisted of letters (lowercase and uppercase), numbers, and symbols in no particular order.

After the first time, I thought I may have let something malicious slip into my system, so I scanned my Windows desktop with Microsoft Security Essentials, Malwarebytes, SuperAntiSpyware, and RootkitRevealer. None found anything obviously out of place other than the usual handful of tracking cookies. To be on the safe side, I decided to change all of my important passwords to various accounts - none of which had shown, or have shown since, any signs of intrusion.

The only third party applications I had on my iPhone at the time were the SomaFM Player and Zenonia, a popular adventure game/RPG. I know I hadn't responded to any phishing e-mails - the only things I ever open are from people I personally know or newsletters I know I personally signed up for (i.e. Newegg promotional stuff). I was doubly sure I hadn't entered my iTunes log in information anywhere but iTunes and my iPhone.

I figured it was a fluke, or that maybe Apple had some sort of leak somewhere, and just sucked it up and reset my password after my account was refunded. A week later it happened again. I was feeling a little paranoid, so I decided to go a bit nuts and DBAN my hard drive and reinstall Windows. I was once again refunded and changed my iTunes account password. The account was broken into yet again not long after. At that point I figured the issue had to be a security flaw on Apple's end and respectfully made it apparent to the customer support employee contacting me that I had no interest whatsoever in reopening my account, and would appreciate it if any and all information associated with it could be removed.

I, personally, do not see how it can be my fault that my account was broken into three times in a row, with a freshly wiped hard drive and in a span of time in which I am 100% sure I had never opened a single suspicious e-mail or used my iTunes account information anywhere but iTunes.

Don't set up an admin system that shits all over people who disagree with you. Maybe then your appeal for donations would be considered by a larger number of people. I've been sending SomaFM at least $50 per year for most of this decade and even /. gets $5 from me every now and then. I bought one Wikipedia coaster set back in '03 before I discovered your incompetence and now I quickly close your 'appeals' without reading them. Some may consider that I'm being too picky, but when I saw that Barack Obama had less criticism on his page than Ghandi or Jesus Christ, I knew your system was still flawed, and the Climate Doctor debacle didn't work in your favor, either - and hey, that was, like, 12 months ago, and now you're running out of money - coincidence? Fix that shit and I'll kick down a Ben Franklin.

Here's a slice of the mandatory and automatic internet radio royalty fight, from the point of view of a broadcaster:
http://somafm.com/crb/

More recent stuff from the same guy is
http://somafm.com/blogs/rusty/labels/IREA.html

"The new agreement keeps the per-performance rate structure but reduces the rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board for 2009 and 2010 by about 16 percent and establishes rates for 2011-2015. This year's rate is $0.0015 per streamed recording, moving up to $0.0025 in 2015. The CRB rates were $0.0018 for 2009 and $0.0019 for 2010."

You can look up the CRB and SoundExchange elsewhere (like soundexchange.com).

Here's a slice of the mandatory and automatic internet radio royalty fight, from the point of view of a broadcaster:
http://somafm.com/crb/

More recent stuff from the same guy is
http://somafm.com/blogs/rusty/labels/IREA.html

"The new agreement keeps the per-performance rate structure but reduces the rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board for 2009 and 2010 by about 16 percent and establishes rates for 2011-2015. This year's rate is $0.0015 per streamed recording, moving up to $0.0025 in 2015. The CRB rates were $0.0018 for 2009 and $0.0019 for 2010."

You can look up the CRB and SoundExchange elsewhere (like soundexchange.com).

Honestly, find a few labels that carry the stuff you know you like, and sign up for their newsletter or just check the release schedule on occasion. The other alternative, as someone mentioned, was to find a group of similar minded individuals and join their forum (Google can help you with that).
Aside from that, you can try the usual streaming suspects (last.fm and Pandora, etc..) but you might also try some off the wall streamers like Soma.fm, etc.

Is MySpace still an e-venue for bands trying to do promotion? Does Wikipedia have articles for bands you like?

Also, if you can describe what types/aspects of 'classic' you like, especially for the historical stuff, that will help you tons. For example I perfer Harpsichords over Pianos, and especially accompanied by strings... alittle hunting brings up a few hits that that gets you started.

Once you FIND what you're looking for, I'm sure you still have some sorta media store like a BestBuy that you can put in special orders from, or just buy their stuff on Amazon, etc

My favorite shoutcast station is Groove Salad: A nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves.

SomaFM is offering its Groove Salad station in 128 kbps AAC.

My favorite places are

Icarus
SomaFM
The Current 89.3

all of which are reasonably ad-free and play stuff you won't find on popular radio. There are some really good songs on there that I would never have heard otherwise. (listening to Still - King Communicado, right now).

I used to like some of the stations on AOL radio, but they started blocking Finnish IP addresses, so I found these other stations. Their loss, not mine.

"While I can accept that music would be less distracting that office chatter, I simply don't understand the concept that music is better than silence."

Dude, you have not heard the voices inside my head. Otherwise, you would see clearly the point being made.

BTW, here's my fave: http://somafm.com/

Not sure why there would be a flamewar, anyone with ears can hear that AAC+ sounds better than any other codec at low bitrates. I listen to Groove Salad from SomFM in AAC+ because I can't tell the difference between the 48k AAC+ stream and the 128k mp3 stream and it costs them almost 1/3rd the bandwidth for the AAC+ stream. Now for general use I use mp3 because it's universally supported which is obviously NOT the case with AAC+.

You should try somafm if you haven't already. I feel the same way about most indie music, but I'm a pretty big Groove Salad fan. My father and I both listen to it. We've even bought some CDs of the good stuff I've found on it. (Dzihan & Kamien, Groove Armada, Baby Mammoth, Mr. Scruff)

So I listen to SOMAFM.COM

And Radio Paradise.

RS

1. Caffeine
2. Groove Salad
3. Headphones
4. Bonus: A deadline

The first is best in low to medium doses, anything more than that and I'm too wired to really focus. Best served green and carbonated or with equal amounts of milk and sugar. The second falls under the category of "repetitive music with few to no lyrics." The third can actually stand apart from the second because I've found that even if I'm not actually listening to anything at the time people see the headphones and (usually) give a second thought to bothering me, especially at work. Finally the deadline is a big factor because like many people I seem to produce my best code under pressure.

Of course it also helps to have tools that I don't have to fight against to get things done, time away from my coworkers (who are usually great fun, which is actually the problem), and no constant email interruptions.

http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/

Thanks, I'll check it out. I've found a few streaming stations that I like, including SomaFM and WFMU.

What about the radios that don't make any profit?

I am specifically thinking of SOMA FM and WCPE. I know that WCPE is a non-profit, for instance, and they are two of the best radios I know.

Are these exempted or not? Does anyone know?

Try SomaFM internet radio. It's worked for me everywhere I've gone, and I love the music.

http://somafm.com/, the very cool internet radio site, is also completely ad free, and entirely user supported. Of course, there are links to amazon, etc., for every song, so of course the content itself can be considered advertising for the artists, but that's as it should be.

Quake and Spy Hunter.

Someone already mentioned that the Quake soundtrack was done by Trent Reznor and was playable in an audio CD player (even just the $5 shareware release on CD was).

But the Spy Hunter soundtrack is perhaps even more significant for its time. If anyone else ever listens to SecretAgent Radio on somafm.com, you will even encounter that song played on occasion. And it is how old now? I think I even heard an instrumental version (with actual instruments) played on a local jazz station a couple months ago.

Quake and Spy Hunter.

Someone already mentioned that the Quake soundtrack was done by Trent Reznor and was playable in an audio CD player (even just the $5 shareware release on CD was).

But the Spy Hunter soundtrack is perhaps even more significant for its time. If anyone else ever listens to SecretAgent Radio on somafm.com, you will even encounter that song played on occasion. And it is how old now? I think I even heard an instrumental version (with actual instruments) played on a local jazz station a couple months ago.

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).

Most of the new stuff I encounter is from places like SomaFM. Most (all?) of the stuff they play is from indie labels and unsigned bands, and I can listen passively, which means I get decent background tunes while I work, and if I hear something I like, I can take a look at my stream player to see who the artist is and investigate from there.

Basically, I'm lazy, so why not let someone else send the music to me? :)

I find a lot of new music by listening to Shoutcast, the same way I found new music when I listened to "normal" radio. Most channels play a certain genre or style of music, and not a random mix of everything as you seem to expect. SomaFM's Drone Zone, for example, only plays ambient, so you won't be hearing any "popular" music there.

One of the ways I find bands is by listening to internet radio like somafm, or to college radio stations, the local one here is wiux (they do net streaming). Pandora is great too, just put in who you like and they will recommend and play new music.

Also it is good to support your local scene, find out where indie bands play then listen to the ones coming on myspace, and go see them. It's nice because it is generally way cheaper to see an indie band than going to a mainstream artist's show.

Also good: emusic, for something like $15 a month you get 50 songs or so. Pretty damn cheap. They have newsletters and stuff, plus as you download CDs, they can match you up with other people who have similar tastes and you can see what they like. Plus there are popularity charts, etc.

SomaFM provides nice streams in various formats that can be played by free software. Lately I've taken to listening on my phone while on the road. If only I could make my phone's media player not timeout every 5 minutes, I could probably cancel my satellite radio subscription...

You should try SomaFM. It's free, commercial-free, listener-supported online music. I prefer Groove Salad, but there are some other good channels on it too.

But they won't kill internet radio in the US. They'll kill internet radio BASED in the US.

Not true. It kills internet radio broadcasts that stream to the U.S., according to Rusty Hodge of soma.fm:

But they won't kill internet radio in the US. They'll kill internet radio BASED in the US.

Not true. It kills internet radio broadcasts that stream to the U.S., according to Rusty Hodge of soma.fm:

It's easy, and fun! Here we go:

It ain't SoundExchange that's deciding they should collect those royalties, it's the *government* deciding they should, and it's actually not a bad idea.

Of course it's not a bad idea - if you're the one collecting the checks. And just because the government says it should, that doesn't mean it represents what the people want. Let me introduce you to a concept called a Lobbying Group. Just because you can lay down big bucks and effect a change in the legal system does NOT mean it's what the people want. It's what the industry wants, and they are radically different things.

They can simply sign some forms and demand their cheque.

It's as simple as that! No...actually it's more like this. You must join to collect your money. Resistance...is useless.

It is, as it happens, *particularly* good for the small and independant artists, as radio stations would have a hell of a time tracking down and dealing with every random garage band they decided to play.It is, as it happens, *particularly* good for the small and independant artists, as radio stations would have a hell of a time tracking down and dealing with every random garage band they decided to play.

Provided of course that the band in question actually wanted to get paid. Some of us make music just because we like it, you know. It was art before it was a business. Some folks think of it still as art. Not everything amounts to a "cash flow opportunity".

Without compulsory licensing, I'd bet the vast bulk of college, independant, and web-based radio stations would shut down completely, thanks to the overhead of negotiating licensing deals.

And yet, these are the exact same groups compulsory licensing are shutting down. Wow, what a surprise! The people who promote indie music are the ones being nailed, all the while the shill says that these are the people he's trying to help.

Sure, pal. Sure.

Didn't this all happen five years ago? Somafm went away for some royalty reason. Then a few years later everything was fine again. What's different this time around?

You can read about what happened in 2002 on their website. Basically, the record companies demanded $500 per day from SomaFM. SomaFM and its listeners responded by encouraging Congress to pass the Small Webcasters Amendment Act which reduced the royalty rates to a more manageable $2000 to $5000 per year.

What is different now is ... well, not much I suppose. It would seem that the recording industry is trying once again to kill internet radio by influencing the Copyright Royalty Board to hike the royalty rates by astronomical amounts.

I am not a US citizen or resident, so I don't have the option of calling my senator or representative. So instead, I have started sending emails to artists whose music I have purchased as a direct result of having heard it on internet radio from the US.

I don't buy music every day, but I do buy some, and almost all of it because I heard it on the internet and I liked it (...and then managed to find it for sale online without DRM, but that's a separate issue).

I'd be willing to bet that a lot of small/independent musicians aren't even aware that these issues are being decided in their name, and they are the one's who would have the most to lose (IMHO).

So yes, the world/internet does not stop at the US border, but I like somafm.

plus, as the song says: First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin...

If this legislation passes then small independent internet radio stations will be unable to pay the fees and therefor immediately go off the air. This is a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. I can say for a fact that 80% of the new music I have bought in the last 12 months has been because I heard it on an internet radio station. For more information and some great music check out http://somafm.com/crb/ They have helpful information on how to contact your local Congressman and tell him/her that you do not support this act.

Do not be fooled - boycotting will not work.

Do not be fooled - boycotting will not work.

What Internet radio stations do you listen to and why?

The most common two for me are:

Digital Gunfire

Groove Salad

The RIAA and the major labels have take the position that the law in the territory of destination of a transmission will govern and that off-shore webcasters streaming into the US will still have liability for transmissions (i.e., public performances) that terminate in the US. Therefore, moving a webcaster's facilities off shore will not immunize them from liability or the reach of US courts, particularly if the owner/operator still has sufficient business in the US.