SLOAN RANGER
Enhanced ShoutCast Player - the Swiss Army knife of Internet radio
WANDA SLOAN
ESP is the simplest program yet for listening to Internet radio, recording music to your hard disk or finding songs for download, and all at the same time. |
I wouldn't call it the fastest growing or most popular online activity, but there are sure a lot of people who listen to Internet radio.
It has a lot going for it, and in my view is superior to satellite radio in most ways, including cost, variety and availability. Well, okay, that last part is a bit of a cheap shot, but even if/when satellite radio is widely available in Thailand, I'll probably still stick with the Net, mostly or entirely.
Letters to our HelpDesk prove that some people are still struggling to find dependable bandwidth, but in general most Internet users with the big providers can stream radio broadcasts. Some may have to stay down at the low end of the quality scale, but there is a huge number of stations broadcasting at 32kbps or below, and that is at least as good as most ordinary home or car radios. For those with good connections, stations at 96 and 128kbps and above provide excellent quality, better than most Thai FM stations on high-end tuners.
The obvious chief advantage of radio on the Internet is that there are many, many more stations than on any radio including the best-equipped satellite receivers. The availability is astounding, and there are numerous web sites that aggregate, list and sort them by language, genre, bandwidth or pretty well any way you can think of.
There are a lot of radios on the market now that work through your Internet connection, sort of like some of the phones that are starting to appear in Thailand. They are calling them Wi-Fi radios, which is probably as descriptive as anything else.
I haven't seen one for sale in a Thailand mall yet, but they cost about $150 to $200 in Internet stores. I don't see how they ever will be very popular though.
They have built-in limitations that mean you have to tune them like a video recorder. But on the Net itself, using a browser, you can switch from Polish folk songs to Indian trance to Radio Isan as fast as you can click.
A browser with a music-player added on is a good starting place. Internet Explorer or Firefox using Winamp or Spider Play lets you choose the stations and listen to them. But it's still a slightly clumsy way to play Internet radio. Numerous geeks have put their mind to coming up with better tuners and players, and I have been very impressed by one.
Enhanced ShoutCast Player is a nice all-in-one tuner and player. It is "limited" to the thousands of radio stations - mostly MP3-based - on the Shoutcast aggregator, but it has two added features which I think are sensational.
The tuner itself is pretty straightforward. It will call up the web page of Shoutcast.com for you if necessary - in your browser - and all you need to do to start listening or to change the station is to click the Play button. It has a tiny screen footprint with a simple slider for volume. You can even store your favourite stations.
So far, ESP is a lot like a lot of Internet radio players. But the two extras are what set it apart: Feature One is that with one click the program will reach out on the Internet to find free downloads of more music by the artist you are listening to - and download it for you. This is not a black-market, pirate activity; there is a tonne of free music out there in the form of samples and come-ons and loss-leaders, and these are the chief source of ESP's finds. For each song it finds, you can click the download button and get it on your own hard drive.
Feature Two is, in my opinion, worth having ESP for. The program will rip the station you are listening to, and save the songs or talk-show segments or whatever to your computer - and cut neatly into individual tracks. Each track or song is named with the artist and title of the song or programme segment.
There are scads of programs which will take batches of MP3s, and insert tags for you. And the tags are what show on the output of your music player, virtual or real.
I love this feature. I have been ripping music this way for several years. My own particular favourite use of ripped music is to burn it on a CD and take it along in the car or truck.
An MP3 CD in the car can play for many hours because the songs take up so much less disk space. Quality? Yes, it is not as good as an original CD. But how good is the quality of your car's stereo player, not to mention the Bangkok street noise?
The key to burning an MP3 CD is to simply copy the songs as files. Any MP3 player will play them fine and you can easily get 100 or many more on a single CD, depending on the initial quality and file size.
The ESP program is illustrated and available for download from the generous folks at http://www.remlapsoftware.com.
Email: wandasloan@gmail.com.
Prev
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Next
