So this is a great site, but suddenly you can’t find your favorite show where you expect it. What’s up?
Starting for 2011, testing of stations and programs is mandatory. You won’t be able to listen to a station or a show unless it has been tested recently – that means we want ALL people who use the directory involved in testing.
The “What’s on now” pages are the most affected – if all of the entries for a show expire, the show goes away and you won’t be able to find it – a Show Search will still find the show you’re looking for:
If you arrived directly from Google to a show page, you won’t notice anything changed.
The Show page (radio-show.php) will show all stations whether they are tested or not. If you try to listen on an untested station, a new popup window opens that requests that you perform a test:
Click on the Listen button right away – the window is waiting for you to complete the test, not to start the test. The amount of time the test will wait depends on what you are testing. After the time is up, you’ll see the Confirmation screen:
You aren’t required to actually do a test (yet), but if you ignore this request, the stream remains untested and will continue to pester you each time try to use the stream. After a few weeks more, that station will vanish completely from the Station list.
There are no ads here, you aren’t requested or required to pay to use the site – this new method doesn’t even require you to register with the web site. Whether people are helpful will determine if there is a StreamingRadioGuide in 2012.
Even easier now – unless you have disabled javascript, the player will automagically launch itself, so all you have to do is confirm the test. If you don’t respond, after about 15 minutes the testing window will automatically go away.
One side benefit of this change is I can see all the people who are “scraping” my web pages on a regular basis to gather the stream data :) Tip: Don’t have your robots blindly follow javascript links inside an href.
Hey – I don’t do sports. At all. None. Period. Happy to tell you that a sporting event preempted programming but please don’t ask me to tell you such details as what level, division and all that crap. I don’t even care to know what teams are playing. Honest. I don’t CARE about all that crap. I’m not going to wait to find all that crap out. I hate sports and I’m gone to another station already. Upshot of this is, I’m trying to help but not if it requires an athletics dissertation to do it, sports fans!
I feel the same way. The reason for ID’ing sports is not because people are looking for sports (most sports aren’t allowed to stream), but to prevent me from being flooding with “This Station’s broken” emails when all that is “wrong” is the station pulled down the stream because of a “game”. About 95% of the time, Report Sports shows you the correct team that is the cause of the preemption. I’ve made it about as simple as it can be, given that I hate sports too.
Just a side note – it’s possibly because this week has a lot of high school and college baseketball – but I’m starting to develop the impression that a lot of news/talk radio stations are really walking away from Talk in the evenings in order to broadcast local high school sports….. even Girl’s Basketball. Seriously – if there are only 15 people in the stands, what makes them think anyone wants to listen to basketball sneakers squeaking on a gym floor and walking back and forth to shoot foul shots.
One gem the other night was a radio guy doing local football play by play who announced that their team was moving from left to right on your screen. Ummm…. my radio doesn’t have a screen. If perhaps the game was also being broadcast on a local access Cable TV channel, it would be pretty obvious which way the home team was facing.
Art I did not ignore checking radio stations I feel foolish I tried but did not know how to do it until I asked my Husband .I waited for the station to start up and when it didn’t I quit. As soon as he showed me to wait a while and the station started and the the box that said is it working open I pressed yes and knew how to check. I checked the last two times,proudly after being asked and did it correctly. Can you please let me use the guide again
Today, I have learned that radiotime is not a worthy substitute for the streaming radio guide. I have been reduced to listening Dave Ramsey for hours at a time…..lol.
me too.
it;s hard to find a comprehensive listing of conservative/libertarian shows, and radiotime really doesnt do that.
i never got those ‘did it work’ requests.