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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

It is seemingly too expensive to get one's own radio station, though I'd like to do this in my area -- in the same way that people are blogging or podcasting. There used to be Radio Carson here in Pittsburgh, which had some great (and not so great) electronic music. Now what do we have? Right-wing propoganda, 3 classic rock stations, and the usual dirth of lite-rock and wannabe-rock. Best thing going for broadcast radio is WRCT from CMU. What about a geek-propoganda radio station?

College radio is great listening too, and most college stations have online streams. I like WTBU out of Boston University -- amazingly eclectic programming schedule.

There's a bunch of good stations out there... a quick list that I've got on hand:

• Pittsburg: WRCT
• Georgia: WREK
• New York: WFUV
• Los Altos, CA: KFJC
• Berkeley, CA: KALX
• San Francisco, CA KUSF
• Davis, CA: KDVS
• Stanford, CA: KZSU

There are other comments above that similar mistakes were made for MIT. It doesn't seem like a whole lot of care went into making that list.

Try listening to Total Information Awareness on Wednesdays from 6-7 pm EST, webcast at wrct.org. WRCT is Carngie Mellon's student run radio station. They did a special edition last Friday from Summercon 2004.

Here's a short listing of some I know about (thanks to another poster for reminding me about KDVS):

• Pittsburg: WRCT
• Georgia: WREK
• New York: WFUV
• Los Altos, CA: KFJC
• Berkeley, CA: KALX
• San Francisco, CA KUSF
• Davis, CA: KDVS
• Stanford, CA: KZSU

One thing to remember about college radio is that it changes constantly from program to program... there's often very litte of an attempt at presenting a consistent sound as in commercial radio. So don't just listen once or twice to a station and assume you know what they're about. Maybe you should look for an online program schedule to figure out when to listen.

Now, now, don't get all worked up on me, here. For years I've been using the MBone tools, and I figure the pain involved in that experience earns me the right to be a little cranky. IP multicast just instinctively seems like such a good idea that it is always upsetting to discover that, in practice, it has been just about useless.

Part of this, I think, is because of the applications chosen. Many to many videoconferences are a bad demo app because the truth is that most people don't need many-to-many -- they need some-to-some, or more likely one-to-many, both of which can be done adequately (read: better, also known as "more predictably") with unicast technologies.

There was also a culture that grew up around the MBone that discouraged innovation, both in terms of the tools and the community using them (which, let's face it, was basically, "only those of us that were NANOG regulars. No one wanted to build or to use new tools, because we've got these free TCL tools that suck! And did we mention that they're free? Yep, vic, vat, and sdr -- that's all you need! Never mind that they were "technology demos" that were never actually supposed to be permanent parts of the infrastructure. Why take any effort to make better ones? Worse is better

And of course, unless you were part of NANOG or the nsfnet clique generally, just try to multicast something on the MBone that actually served another community. I remember getting a van-o-gram because I was multicasting WRCT on the MBone. Van didn't like that I was taking bandwidth away from his friends. The MBone crowd would rather stop people from using the network than, say, admit publically that pruning didn't work and that maybe they should stop recommending multicast as a solution to any problem, anywhere, until this was fixed (which I believe, thank god, it finally has been).

But this -- now this is a cool use for multicast. Watching Counterstrike games is amazingly cool, but there is such a penalty for the players of a game to allow unlimited spectating, since each additional unicast client would slow down the server and clog the network further. Kudos to these guys for going the extra mile (and coming up with an application compelling enough to convince a community with a natural urge to monkey with the network to get involved in multicast).

My only concern is: is multicast really deployed end-to-end? This is a trick question, because really I'm saying "No fucking way is multicast deployed end to end!" In fact, I'd be amazed if more than about half of the big national providers did multicast even in their backbone. Or am I being pessimistic? I'd be curious to know if anyone has real statistics on this issue.

A less priveliged community can fairly easily pull together the dough to get an LPFM station, base it at, for example, a local public school, and then provide a tremendous number of services to the local area. Not only programming that addresses the local communtiy's needs (rather than shrinkwrapped kool-kulture brought to you by 102.5 the BUZZ), but also on-the-job training for people interested in careers in broadcast media, and hands-on experience in positive, community-oriented programming for the students at the school.

It also allows another way to inexpensively bring independant music (either local, national, or international) to the ears of people who want to hear it. This provides a real alternative to big radio's spoonfed programming, generally chosen by computers to suit a perceived demographic.

And, most importantly, the bar to accessing the media is very low - a working radio can be had for less than $10. That's a lot less than a $1500-$3000 dollar computer, or even a cheapo iOpener that requires a monthly fee. Additionally, converting a LPFM station for internet simulcast is not hard to do, should the cost on internet access drop in the future.

IMO, the more access people have to accessible media sources, the freer they will be.

R. Reed Taylor
General Manager '98-'99, WRCT Pittsburgh 88.3 FM