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Internet Radio: Everything You Need To Know To Stream Fantastic Music For Free Around The World

 


Suffering from fever in the cabin? Need an escape? Internet radio can open doors.

Whisper a few call letters in a smart speaker, invoke a smartphone app, or press a few computer keys to be whipped away, far from your locked existence, transported across the country or to the other side of the world , with a ticket to buy or passport to show. You won’t even need to put on a mask.

Want to hang out on a hot Brazilian beach with a new girl from Ipanema? Paul’s Internet radio station in Rio can take you there. California Do you dream of climbing Laurel Canyon with local legends singing in your ears? Enter SomaFMs Left Coast 70s. For those who planned an entertainment getaway to London before hell broke loose, BBC 4 radio dramas can still highlight the acting skills of the West End. And BBC Radio 6 is great for removing punchy rock club concerts from its archives. More in the caf scene in Paris? An atmospheric soundtrack of cool-school and gypsy jazz Django-ing is just a tap (and a snifter of cognac) on the sublime TSF Jazz and FIPS stores around the Jazz of the city.

Jonathan Takiff / IDG

Internet radio lets you hear the musical styles from which they were born. PaulInRio.com broadcasts from Riode Janeiro, Brazil.

Even the most esoteric of musical (and informative) tastes from Bollywood to Schlagerare served by dozens on Internet radio: digital audio services that you call on any speaker, computer or smartphone connected to the Internet. Better still, most of these stations are free from advertising, thanks to funding from the government and listeners, support from colleges or the creator’s private endowment.

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The Great American Songbook station, based in the Netherlands, is a perfect example. Station fan Peter Skiera, general manager of internet radio maker Como Audio, presents this station as a labor of love by a retired broadcaster [Rene Dussen] with a basement full of records and a small recording studio. In these ears, the content of the stations rivals that of the pay radio SiriusXMs Strictly Sinatra, but as with all Internet radio streams, live and on demand, the price of admission to the Great American Songbook is free.

How to Listen to Internet Radio

If you know a station is calling letters or a name, it’s a breeze to carry a specific Internet radio station to a computer or smart device, type it in or speak to a smart speaker like Amazon Echo, Google Home or Apple HomePod.

For deep sea fishing in the great unknown, however, it’s worth going through a radio station aggregator: an online database of organized links to radio stations searchable by location, genre, popularity and sometimes flow quality.

Michael Brown / IDG

TuneIn Radio is the 800 pound gorilla of Internet radio aggregators. You can use its service on the web or with an Android or iOS app, but an ad-free experience costs $ 9.99 per month.

TuneIn Radio, the 800 pound gorilla of Internet radio aggregators, is the first of many and the first in my heart. TuneIn Radio comes pre-installed or can be loaded on over 200 connected devices, including smart speakers such as Sonos and Bose, smart TVs, streaming media players (e.g. Roku and Amazon Fire TV), smartphones , tablets, game consoles (Xbox and PlayStation) and personal computers.

With a global database of over 100,000 stations in 197 countries and 22 languages, plus 5.7 million podcasts and on-demand offerings, TuneIn comes closest to being comprehensive (and domination) of world radio. Senior Marketing Director Ana Guillen tells me that it now attracts 75 million listeners per month and has experienced a particularly strong 53% increase in news content audience as the COVID-19 pandemic hit is intensified.

The most notable gap in the TuneIns channel library are the 853 commercial stations in 153 US markets owned by iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel Communications). To access it, you must access the iHeartRadio application and portal, which can also be accessed free of charge on Internet radios, smartphones, tablets, computers and similar connected devices. Aiming to become a one-stop destination (and sell more advertising), iHeartRadio also offers attractive playlists and personalized music stations (Pandora-style); has entered into distribution agreements with commercial radio stations in Canada, Australia and New Zealand; and also connects listeners to some non-aligned stations. But the service does not have the global reach or the stylistic diversity of TuneIn or other very demanding streaming radio promoters.

Jonathan Takiff / iDG

VTuners stripped down but the rich content app lets you search for gold by genre, location, language, fastest speed, lowest speed and popularity.

Veteran Internet radio aggregator VTuner has a database that rivals TuneIn. Thirty employees in the Philippines are struggling to maintain their inventory of station formats, URLs and streaming codecs. Hundreds of stations from around the world presenting in a particular category are literally accessible with a single press on the VTuners barebones, but a functional website. I also appreciate that this application allows a user to search their inventory by the sound quality of the signal (more on this momentarily). The VTuner platform powers several lines of smart speakers and A / V receivers, although in recent years it has lost significant market share to Germany-based rival Airable.

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Do you want to be directed by hand to the most popular local stations in a music, news or sports radio category? MediaU’s on-screen guide (also based in Germany) offers user-friendly graphics and a sophisticated bundle of Euro-centric choices. What is number 1 on their country station roundup? Country Radio based in Prague, with cowboys singing in the Czech language. To hear is to believe.

Jonathan Takiff / IDG

The station rankings on MediaU.net show that country music is not just an American phenomenon.

I’ve also been lucky to fish in the waters of Radio.net. And I found interesting stations on the Internet only on Internet-radio.com, although the entries on its featured list suggest paid positioning. The best choices are Classic Rock Florida HD, Smooth Jazz Florida and Modern Jukebox Radio.

Radio.Garden is the most playful and eccentric aggregator of all. This very engaging and ultra-fast search tool can be easily implemented on a smartphone or tablet via an iOS or Android application. (But the site was characterized as insecure and requiring the intercession of third-party software before it could be loaded onto my iMac.) Open this stuff on a screen and you’ve presented an animated map of the world. Tap a location point and selected pops appear in the immediate area and nation.

Jonathan Takiff / IDG

Radio.Garden allows you to choose from Internet radio stations based on their geographic location by clicking on dots on a global photo-satellite map.

Now press Search and the gardener provides immediate access to radio stations by country, city or call letters, as well as bouquets from our favorite stations, playfully classified as independent stations, energetic rhythms (electronics, dance) , time travel (content from past decades), Weird Frequencies (like Theater Organ Radio and Birdsong Radio) and Ends of the Earth (self-explanatory). As I write, I am listening to a very exciting electronic output from Bristol, UK: Noods Radio. The strange strains of another world give me the impression of living in a very strange film.

In my opinion, the real Internet radio stations are independent, organized and free; they are not corporate, computerized and expensive. You might not hear the voice of a DJ or even see a metadata screen tag identifying artists and tracks on a station like KCRW-Eclectic24. (This is where song identification services like Shazam come in handy.) And hours or even days of programming can be scheduled in advance on studio servers.

Como Audio

Como Audios Elegant Musica offers a great way to access the rich content available on Internet radio.

But the oddity of the selections, the themes presented in the sequences indicate the presence of a human being, and not of an algorithm, making aesthetic calls and structuring the playlist. And if necessary, the shows can be turned on for a penny. A recent hour-long afternoon scan of rustic folk classics like Sam Stone and Illegal Smile playing on Eclectic24 was all the news I needed to know that John Prine had just died and someone at the station was crying and paid homage.

Internet radio sound quality
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Internet radio used to get a deserved rap for sound quality close to AM quality. Not anymore. The lossy digital compression schemes deployed in the mid-1990s, streaming audio players such as RealAudio and Nullsoft were rudimentary and extreme, with low bit rates cutting the head, tail and feet of each song to skip it. through the modest data channel available to private Internet users at the time.

Even in the early 2000s, it was common to find perceptual encoded MP3 streams operating at rates as low as 16 Kbps by buying quieter and more obscure sounds in the psycho-acoustic theory which seems louder, so why bother to push all this extra data down the drain? MP3s frightened demanding musicians like Neil Young, who knew what was lost in translation.

Thinkstock

If this is what you imagine when you listen to Internet radio, it has been far too long since you have listened to an Internet radio station.

The story is different today, judging by the transmission rates published by VTuners (users can also call Como Audio radio screens). Even technically and financially short-term stations in third world countries provide MP3 content encoded at 48, 56 and 64 Kbps, or else work with the more efficient AAC codec at bit rates of 32 or 48 Kbps, usually with 44.1 kHz sampling rate. In more sophisticated web radio operations, bit rates from 128 to 192 and even 320 Kbps are becoming more common, the latter being characterized by high resolution.

The only downside to 320 Kbps streaming, says Skiera, is that you can run out of network capacity on the home network when you have five speakers connected, all playing at a high resolution rate.

Como Audio speakers (and some competing brands) also support the rarely used MPEG-DASH, ASF and HTTPS podcast security formats. Skiera says that Como has no plans to integrate lossless codecs like FLAC and MQA into his radios. The latter is expensive to license and integrate, and I would say that you won’t notice the superior quality on a compact speaker. Skiera tells me that he has not heard of any streaming radio stations migrating to these formats.

Jonathan Takiff / IDG

A Como Audio Internet radio display screen shows streaming at its best (Linn Radio).

A brief history of Internet radio

Internet radio started in the early 1990s as an amateur toy, the first cousin of shortwave radio. Then, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 imposed a hefty royalty payment structure on any web station with more than a few hundred listeners. It buried a bunch of these basement startups. Today, only the strongest survive.

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Although late for the party, almost all local broadcast stations on earth (commercial and non-commercial) now have an online simulcast stream. An excellent equalizer, Internet radio transforms a low-power community station in the world with almost the same weight as a 50,000 watt blaster in large cities. (Although it may have broadcast as little as 580 watts and is now up to 13K direction, Marthas Vineyard WMVY’s adult alternative station has consistently ranked among the top 20 Internet stations in the world. Not too shabby .)

Internet radio simulcasts are also a lifeline for listeners in dense urban areas, where the broadcast FM signals are distorted by multiple paths. In my hood, online versions of favorite locals like alternative non-commercial WXPN and jazz / classical WRTI sound like a CD, while FM broadcasts spit on my speakers like a worn vinyl record.

Ryan Stefan (CC0)

The ability to import distant signals has also proven to be a welcome development for displaced citizens, especially outsourced sports enthusiasts who still want to follow their favorite teams with a remote web update. Ditto with displaced foreigners who want to hear their mother tongue.

I’m happy to connect with government-supported ad-free stations in places like Britain, Germany, and Denmark, as these point of sale format choices are often far more liberated than the ones you would find usually on public stations in the United States. , Prog-rock, R&B and Hip-Hop are also in the public interest!

Pandora, Spotify et al are not Internet radio stations

Some people bundle music on demand services like Pandora and Spotify into their best Internet radio roundups. Yes, these services are streamed over the Internet and are accessible on the same computers, phones, set-top boxes and smart speakers. But for former broadcasters like Como Audios Skiera and myself (as a former programmer / presenter of FM free-form shows on WMMR and WYSP in Philadelphia), his anathema is to insert a Pandora powered by the musical genome or an on-demand library like Spotify in the Internet radio category. While these services offer new music playlists and radio format music caches labeled Alternative, Dance / Electronic, R&B, Soul / Funk, etc., services like these can be described more specifically as juke -box online.

The SiriusXMs satellite radio broadcaster’s channel lineup is also available in the United States (and wide) on many home streaming devices, computers, and smartphones via an Internet radio-style portal. But even without the basic car game, they don’t give it away. Depending on the size of the range and bonus features, the 200 to 300 channel home plan will cost you from $ 8 to $ 13 per month.

I hope I piqued your interest in Internet radio. In tomorrow’s installment, I’m going to show you how to find the types of music you love the most, and I’ll be sharing more of my personal selections with which I’m coming back.

Note: When you buy something after clicking links in our articles, we can earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details.

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