Do You Remember Rock N' Roll Radio? (part 2 of 2)

Okay, yesterday I bitched and moaned about satellite radio and how it wasn't scratching my radio itch. Well, something I've learned is that you shouldn't knock down someone else's idea unless you can think of something better, or unless you just really don't like that person.

So, what do I do instead of listen to local, but crappy commercial radio? Instead of much better, but expensive satellite radio? I use three major tools: Internet streams, time-shifted local radio, and podcasts. Here goes!

Internet Radio Streams
Internet radio stations come in two, maybe three varieties. The most common is the "stream my record collection without human intervention" variety. These are basically software on someone's computer that randomly, or semi-randomly plays songs from a large playlist 24 hours a day. They don't have a real disc jockey, and the stations are strongly regulated by the federal government, but they can play some pretty darn good music. Good stations come and go, but I recommend the Americana Roots and Boot Liquor streams. They've been around a long time, and they play great music. I recommend looking at the list at Live365, not cause they're all that great (actually, they kinda suck a little), but because they have the largest number of the do-it-yourself Internet radio streams.

The second kind of Internet stream is basically just a real radio station that's broadcasting both over the airwaves and the Internet. There are lots of college stations across the country that do this, including two of the local universities here in Raleigh-Durham. Unfortunately, though, WNCW does not stream over the Internet last I checked. (I should go check that again.) Holy crap! They do now! I'll have to look into that.

My favorite streamed radio station, though, is by far the Knoxville station, WDVX. These folks have real honest-to-God disc jockeys playing real honest-to-God twangy music, night and day. It's awesome! I love their mix, I love their personalities, and I love that it makes me feel reconnected in a way to my hometown just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee. It's all good stuff, and I think I listen to them more than any other online radio station.

The last kind Internet radio stream is only kinda-sorta a third type because it's really just a blend of the two varieties above. I'm thinking here of stations that sometimes play pre-recorded live radio broadcasts, might have live programs occasionally, and some of the time do the "stream my record collection" thing. I'm thinking of some folks like the Folk Alley streams and the BluegrassCountry.org streams. God bless the Interwebs; we just have so much opportunity sometimes.

The Downside of Internet Streams
Okay, but with all this said, all is not sunshine and kitty cats in the land of Internet streams. There are a few boogeymen and used car salesmen here and there, and they include the fact that you have to be in front of a computer to hear these stations. And for lots of folks, this is a problem. They don't work in front of a computer all day like me! Or, if they do, their employer might not like the constant bandwidth usage of a radio Internet stream. Seriously, I've worked at several large and small companies where they've had to crack down on folks listening to streams because of the stress it put on the corporate network. (The biggest perpetrators? At two companies it's been Radio India Online. No joke.)

So, what do you listen to when you're away from the computer or want to hear some real human voices?

Time-Shifted Local Radio
Come to find out, there's actually quite a lot of good local, non-commercial radio around these parts. The only problem is that it's not on all the time. Actually, all the good music and content is usually on the radio when I cannot or will not be able to hear it. How do you fix this problem?

Time-shifting is the fancy phrase for recording something and watching/listening to it later. TiVo is the famous originator of this for television. For radio broadcasts though, it's the radioShark from Griffin Technologies. This little guy looks like a glowing blue and white shark fin that you plug into the USB port of your Mac or PC. It lets your computer listen to local FM and AM broadcasts, records them as MP3s or AAC files, and lets you add them to your iTunes, iPod, or other player.

What do I listen to? Well, around here I've got the great NPR station, WUNC. Although they're primarily a news radio station (which I listen to pretty religiously), they have two fantastic music programs that I record and listen to almost every week. The Thistle and Shamrock is Fiona Ritchie's world-famous NPR Celtic music hour that's broadcast all over the freaking place. (Fiona is one of my heroes!) I listen to that one just about every damn week. But local to WUNC is the amazing Back Porch Music program that plays Bluegrass, Folk, Old Time, Country, Celtic, and just about anything else twangy you can imagine on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. I record these and listen to them all through the week. God bless you, WUNC! (And like I said before, they do stream over the Internet for you non-Carolinians.)

It doesn't stop there, though. We're very blessed here in North Carolina to also have the local Pinecone Bluegrass Show on the local pop country station every Sunday night. It's a three hour program, but I only get to hear two hours each week since Thistle and Shamrock sits right smack in the middle. It's really nice to have the most popular country station in our area, WQDR, take the time to play a Bluegrass show. I find it very telling of this area and it's roots, and I love it.

But what about other kinds of music? A man cannot live by bread and Bluegrass alone. I need my punk and my Indie Rock! Step in another public radio station here in the Triangle, North Carolina State University's WKNC, "The Revolution." My favorite program there is the Saturday night Shut the Punk Up. They play everything from the Ramones to Blink 182 to Flogging Molly and the Pogues. Great stuff, and I listen pretty regularly.

Sometimes, though, I just need some regular college Indie Rock. So I randomly sample from the Revolution's daily program. Their evening programs are too focused on House, Hip-Hop, and dance music for me, so I just grab their morning and afternoon stuff to hear Indie Rock favorites like Death Cab, Bright Eyes, and local flavor like the Avett Brothers and Ben Folds. Good stuff.

My biggest complaint about WKNC, and I complain because I love them, is that I cannot figure out when their other cool show, "The Hippie Hour," comes on anymore. They play lots of great jam bands, World music, and Reggae... or at least they do when they actually have the damn show on the air. I swear it moves every week, or else they just don't play it every week. Drives me nutty, because the whole point of time-shifting is knowing when you're supposed to record! Oh well, one of these days I'll figure it out. WKNC also used to have a Bluegrass show, but it got even flakier than the Hippie Hour, so I gave up on it ages ago. You get what you pay for on college radio, I guess.

Time-Shifting Yourself to Heck and Back
Okay, so what's the problem with the time-shifting? A few things... one, the software for the radioShark is a little odd sometimes, and it takes up a lot of background processing, so my little Mac Mini on my desk is getting a work-out. That's not a big deal. The second problem is that it's very easy to record WAY more than you can ever listen to. I find about once a month I have to go and delete lots of stuff that's filling up my hard-drive and my iPod to the top.

The answer for this? Well, I haven't solved it yet, but I want to set it up where I have scripts that periodically clean out old recordings. Better yet, instead of automatically adding all the recordings to iTunes and thus my iPod, I want to write a script that creates a podcast feed on my harddrive that iTunes will subscribe to.

Okay, I bet I lost about three-quarters of you on that one. Well, iTunes can subscribe to podcasts, which are really just a file that says there are certain audio or video files accessible somewhere else, usually in a chronological fashion. iTunes can do nifty things like only keep one (or three, or five) episodes of a podcast in its list at a time, thus only adding one (or three, or five, or however many) episodes to your iPod. This makes it easier for us to subscribe to lots of programs, keep up to date with the latest and greatest episode, but not get bogged down with all the old stuff we've already listened to or will never get around to listening to. So, since I'm recording these radio programs and saving them to my hard disk, all I really need is a "podcast file" (called an RSS index file, or an RSS feed) for each program.

Still lost? Okay, say I record the Thistle and Shamrock each week (which I do), but I only want one episode on my iPod at any given time. What I'll do is tell the radioShark to record the program each week and put it in a folder on my hard drive. Okay, well, I can setup a regularly occurring program on my computer (called a "cron job" in Unix-geek-speak) to go out to that folder, find all the audio files there, and write out an RSS index file. Then in iTunes I can subscribe to that RSS index file as a podcast. The trick here is that podcasts aren't just something that happen by magic on faraway computers. They're really just directories of special files that you can get to, either over the web, or from your local hard drive. This allows me to subscribe to the recordings as a podcast in iTunes, which can then say it only wants one episode of the podcast at a time, and voila! My iPod will always have the latest episode of the recording. No getting overfilled with old recordings.

This is actually pretty easy to do, but I just haven't had the time to set it up and write the scripts. When I do I'll post the code here on the blog.

Podcasts
Well, I think I've covered the strong points of podcasts already. Namely, they're portable -- you can put them on anything that can play an MP3 file, and secondly, you can get updates automatically without filling up your hard drive.

A few good ones I listen to regularly (besides our own!) are the Americana Roots podcasts and Fiona Ritchie's new Thistlepod. I also see that the Folk Alley folks have added a new one, but I haven't caught up with it yet.

Lastly, my favorite music podcast is actually a radio show that's broadcasted on several radio stations, even one here in Raleigh -- eTown. However, since the podcast quality is so wonderful, I just listen to it on my iPod or through iTunes every week.

eTown has a unique format. They take two artists each week and have them play live, but almost every week there's a jam at the end where the two artists play together. That lets some really magical things happen. I also really enjoy their host, Nick Forster, the bass player from Hot Rize. He ends up playing guitar with most of the guests at one point or another, and it's always great.

Whew! Have You Had Enough Yet?
Okay, there's a whole bunch of free ways to hear great quality radio programs you can feel good about. Most of them cover Americana music, and all of them are approved by me! I hope you get out and enjoy some if not all of them! If you find something you like that I left out, please share it with us!