If you’re into unstructured listening, the “Random Station” magic button has a few changes that might make it more interesting or useful. There are now 7,300+ radio stations in the United States that are streaming some or all of their programming onto the Internet.
There is now a check box to ignore all stations that insist on adding an extra prestream advertisement before the actual stream starts. Radio seems to think this is the business model that will pay for streaming – you would never accept this on TV or your car radio. Time will tell.
The other change is – lots of programs are expiring because nobody is testing them, especially local programs. When you visit a random station, we’ll show you the last program that we knew about that was on this station at that time (and show it as unconfirmed). If it is still on the air, by clicking Sounds Good!, that will put the show back into the active list.
What bothers me about MUSIC Internet stations is that the vast majority have lousy to mediocre audio quality (circa 1957).
This is the result of using low bit rates and/or that wretched, antique MP3 codec.
The best audio codec, HE-AAC v2, is not supported by either Microsoft or Apple because it would make WMA and AAC, respectively, sound bad.
ADOBE FLASH supports HE-AAC, but the tone deaf and ‘cost saving’ station managers refuse to go beyond 64 kbps.
At least XM Satellite and DAB+ in Europe have ears AND brains.