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PC Mag Reviews Mercora P2P Radio

Posted by michael on from the all-i-hear-is-radio-gaga dept.

prostoalex writes "PC Magazine reviews Mercora peer-to-peer streaming radio. It's not a service which allows anyone to download songs, however you can listen to any of the top 20 million plus songs available on the network from more than 2000 private radiostations. Mercora supports keyword search by genre, song name or artist name, but does not allow to listen to more than four songs from the same artist to avoid copyright issues. Any Mercora user automatically becomes a broadcaster, when the app scans the drive for digital music and then suggests creating an ad-hoc Internet radiostation."

3 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. How's this different from Live365? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Live365 has done this for years, plus Live365 uses standard technology so I can listen with Linux, PalmOS or even an internet-enabled stereo.

  2. Re:How does this get around ASCAP royalty fees? by oreaq · · Score: 4, Informative
    Maybe from "6. INTERACTION WITH THIRD PARTY SITES AND SERVICES" http://www.mercora.com/eula.asp:
    ... You are solely responsible for any dealings with third parties (including advertisers) who support the Service, including the delivery of and payment for goods and services.
  3. legit Streaming audio by andrewzx1 · · Score: 4, Informative
    I provide IT support for a community radio station that provides streaming audio through www.live365.com. First of all let me say that Live365 provides excellent service and hosts many, many wonderful radio stations. We pay something like $1500 for 150 simultaneous listeners at 20 kps. Which is roughly FM quality. It sounds different than FM, but roughly equivalent.

    The radio station used to archive all its programming for people who wanted to do time shifting. This was put to an end by the RIAA and the record industry. We came to a settlement with the RIAA and agreed not to their terms in order to provide any streaming at all.

    There are a lot of great radio stations streaming programming now but the RIAA put 90% of them off the air with the threat of litigation. There used to be thousands of home/hobby stations broadcasting from homes and dorms. The RIAA theatened them with litigation regarding royalties and poof they were gone. This included a lot of great college radio stations unfortunately.

    For anyone who wants to record streaming audio I highly recommend the Windows shareware program TotalRecorder. Don't know if a Linux version is in the works or not.

    - AndrewZ