I’ve made a few changes to the streaming audio station as I continue the constant pursuit of perfection. Finally came up with a name: radio.rox — blindingly obvious but thanks to Charlotte for prodding me in the right direction. The name suggests the new web address:
…which is where you’ll find it.
It now features a listing of the last ten tracks played, which updates every four minutes and links to the appropriate pages on last.fm. So if you hear something you like, you can follow the link and learn more about that artist.
Technical ruminations: There are still only two options for listening: a link that should launch the stream in your media player, and a Quicktime player embedded in the web page. I’d like to add another option, like maybe a Flash player, because not everyone has Quicktime. If anyone knows of a Flash player that can accept audio streams I’d appreciate suggestions.
More technical ruminations: The audio is still streaming over port 8000 which may run afoul of strict firewalls. I’d like to stream it over port 80 which is usually open to allow plain old web traffic, but I haven’t manged to figure that out yet. I have discovered that the embedded player seems to function even when a firewall is blocking the stream in a media player — I don’t know why. Maybe Quicktime somehow converts the stream to port 80? Is that even possible?
Oh, but what about the content? You’ll hear some stuff you absolutely can’t hear elsewhere — audio from my personal collection, some of which I was involved in creating myself, some of which is not commercially available, and of course there’s a wealth of ROX-related stuff in there. But that’s interlarded with a massively aggressively perhaps even obnoxiously eclectic mix of music and other audio from diverse sources. If you don’t like what you hear, wait a bit and you’ll probably hear something very different. You may still not like it, but at least it will be different.
Right now there’s also a lot of Xmas music in the mix. Not necessarily good music… but Xmas nonetheless.
As always, I’m interested to know what you think.
B, a good friend of mine started a net radio station as well. His main focus is Funk. Check out his website and it might give you some ideas. His feed will play in winamp and I have been able to play it in iTunes. http://www.theboogieradio.com/
If you’d like to find out more, shoot me an email and I’ll give you his contact info.
“obnoxiously eclectic”–ha! Assiduously eclectic anyway, to the point that your musical taste is truly inscrutable.