From the main streaming guide menu page, there is a choice that says radio stations by frequency. This was one of the first pages I created and had very little updating and was just plain ugly. It has the potential to be a very useful page, including some features I have not seen anywhere else.
I added a capability similar to the FCC’s search page where you can say only show me stations that match one specific frequency, instead of forcing you to create a range. I also removed TV stations.
So let’s say you know that there’s an oldies format radio station on 97.3 MHz, but you don’t know where the station is located or what the call sign is – now you have a better chance of finding what you’re looking for.
I also modified the FCC link to go to the public inspection file part of the FCC website. If you are interested in radio behind the scenes and have not yet been to the public inspection files online, it is definitely worth a look. The current administration is really pushing radio stations to put their information onto the internet. It only took 25 years to bring along this notion to these companies that are supposedly in the communication business. The data is still incomplete, but one of the requirements from Congress is that radio stations disclose all of their political advertising and who paid for the ads. The only real problem with the public information files is a lot of the time you don’t get the page to load.
Making the public inspection file online releases the radio station from the responsibility of having a physical business location in order for you to inspect this file that nobody ever wants to see. The station also is not required to be staffed by a manager and administrative staff during business hours. As long as there is a phone number that somebody might answer, the FCC is happy. Our ability to contact a radio station is now significantly less certain if the station desires to be secretive and not have a presence in their local community. Just wait until the stations are owned by Saudi sovereign wealth funds…
Looks great and works great, Fred.
I saw the category of “At Work Music” and it made me chuckle. I sometimes listen to a great station for that, but it is not on your list because not only is it webradio only, it is from outside the USA (The Netherlands). Check out http://redlightradio.net/
It normally plays slow electronic or sometimes dance music. I like it when working because it is not a distraction and doesn’t call out for my brain to start singing along. It just drowns out more erratic background noise in workplaces. I recommended it to a lot of friends for workplace music.
Unfortunately, the people who run it speak English as a second language and are not so good at recognizing which English words are suitable for a workplace and which are not. I once heard a song there with Enslish lyrics that the FCC would not like.
Having said that, don’t be fooled by the name. It is an otherwise “PG-13” operation. The name is because they operate out of a storefront window in Amsterdam that had once been used by prostitutes. They have a live webcam on and you can see the DJs working. In winter, before going out for lunch, I take a look and see it is already dark on the street outside their Amsterdam studio.
Long story short, check it out for soft background music that does not distract while you are focusing on something… but maybe not in a corporate environment in case the DJ is not good at censoring English language songs.
At some point I might reconsolidate categories. I had tried to break things into smaller groups for people to work on, but that never really happened. Amphibian country it’s amusing to me, and apparently to one of the owners, but it doesn’t really tell you that much about what music to expect. Ribbit.
A further refinement. This has a lot less to do with humans then it does with Google. I've modified the station directory so that when you click on a city name, you get a list of stations for only that City.
Note that this is literally for that one city. If you click on Charlotte, you're not going to see stations in Concord, which is considered the same metropolitan area.
This should create several thousand new pages to be indexed, that might actually appear in search results. Filtering by metro area might happen, but I have to consider the implications since I am not using standard definitions for metropolitan areas as I wrote about recently. I'm really generally pleased with that, as it is including stations on the periphery of cities which Nielsen / Arbitron basically ignore. If I'm a retailer in Atlanta, there is value to me in advertising on suburban stations, even if they are not heard inside the city of Atlanta. People have been known to drive to a big city nearby to shop.