Information In Audio

Online radio services such as AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm have become rather popular lately and are even available on various mobile wireless devices such as mobile phones. I will take a look at the influence of online radio on traditional radio broadcasters to learn if this means the end of local radio stations.

Local radio stations do seem to have a difficult time nowadays. Satellite radio has been cutting the market share of traditional radio stations severely in the past few years by providing mobility, a large number of commercial-free music channels in addition to news and entertainment channels. In particular, online radio has turn out to be fairly popular by providing a nearly unlimited amount of radio channels.

Pandora in addition to other online radio providers have become available on wireless audio transmitter and portable devices by installing the appropriate app. This increases convenience and mobility of online radio. Mobility has up to now been the main benefit of local radio.

AOL Radio uses CBS radio as its broadcasting platform. It comes with more than 200 music channels. In addition it provides access to over 150 local CBS radio stations. The underlying CBS radio platform “play.it” also allows listeners to create their own customized music channels. This is done by entering the names of albums, tracks or artists. The tracks played on each music channels can also be stored on an iPod for later playback by using 3-rd party tool iGetMusic.

Other online music services have followed suit and are providing similar customized music. Pandora and Last.fm allow listeners to enter the name of an artist and then play music by randomly choosing titles by these artist in addition to other titles which are similar in genre or character. However, most online radio broadcasters lack the ability to create fully customized radio stations such as the “play.it” platform.

Are conventional radio stations destined to become extinct by the constant decrease of market share due to online radio? Online radio is especially useful for niche broadcasters who have been unable to broadcast due to the high expense and licensing of frequency space.

Online radio broadcasters have found it hard to be lucrative. The major reason is the gigantic number of competiting channels which is diluting listeners. The lower cost of online radio at the same time enables making of more interesting content than local radio by serving niche markets and inserting less commercials.

Local programming such as news and local events, however, will remain one of the big benefits of local radio. Up to now the poor audio quality of FM radio has been a big disadvantage. On the other hand, latest digital radio broadcasts are set to enhance the audio quality. One of these technologies is HD radio. Content and mobility will be vital in determining the fate of online and local radio. Online radio offers a large number of choices while local radio excels by providing local content. Both online and local broadcasts offer great mobility. Therefore it is hard to predict a clear winner in this radio battle.

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sharonbal Uncategorized AOL Radio, Online Radio, streaming radio, wireless audio

Listeners of the free online music services AOL Radio and Yahoo! Launchcast are now building and expanding their iPods automatically by using a new recording tool called iGetMusic.

Traditionally building the music collection for an iPod has been a tedious task. The most common method would be ripping tracks from a CD and then convert them to MP3s. As a final step, title and artist information would be added by hand or by using a download service.

Nowadays more and more songs are being purchased from online vendors such as iTunes or downloaded from other sources, some of which may or may not be legal. Downloading songs however still remains a tedious task, not to mention the fact that the recording industry, plagued by falling sales, is putting tons of fake titles onto peer-to-peer (P2P) sites in order to slow the process of illegal downloads. However, downloading a large number of titles still takes a reasonable amount of time. Just imagine entering the search information, waiting for the download to complete etc. for several hundred or even thousand tracks.

To simplify this task, internet radio rippers have become more widespread, such as StreamRipper as a legal alternative to P2P downloads. These programs help automate the process. However, the biggest problem with internet radio rippers is that they are unable to produce cleanly cut tracks since online broadcasters will cross-fade between individual tracks. Thus each song will miss a portion at the beginning or end to remove the cross-faded section. These rippers use the meta data broadcast by online radio stations to determine the beginning or end of each track in order to split tracks. Broadcasters, however, are deliberately varying the time when the meta data changes in relation to the beginning of each track. As a result, in order to get properly cut tracks, a user will manually have to process each track which will take a significant amount of time.

As an alternative, a new recording tool from Amphony called “iGetMusic” is able to extract music from free online radio services such as AOL Radio and Yahoo! Launchcast which each offer hundreds of different music genres. The application is running as a background process and will extract the music from one or several web browsers in parallel which are each tuned to an online radio service. Songs are saved by iGetMusic into any directory and are automatically tagged with song title, artist, album and genre meta data. Songs can be then imported into iTunes software and organized. The meta information allows easy access to a particular song, album or artist later on.  The songs saved by iGetMusic are full length unlike songs created by internet radio rippers, i.e. do not miss the beginning or ending.

When using iGetMusic, a user would launch the application and then open up one or several browser tabs at the same time and tune into any channel of the supported radio services such as AOL Radio. iGetMusic is actually able to grab songs from several browsers running in parallel. In practice this means that the software can rip several thousand tracks in a single day. The recording speed is in practice only limited by the speed of the internet connection and the computer. iGetMusic will check which songs already exist in the music collection and not record duplicate of songs.

As an added bonus, iGetMusic has a feature that automatically saves the album cover of each song which is pleasing to the eye when playing back songs on a computer with a media player such as Winamp or on an iPod. A user can set up a blacklist which contains names of artists that iGetMusic should not record.

Since iGetMusic is able to produce a large number of tracks, storage capacity of the iPod becomes an important consideration. An iPod nano offers up to 16 GBytes of memory and can hold up to 4000 MP3s depending on the sound quality or bit rate. iGetMusic will produce the songs in the AAC Plus (M4A) format which in comparison to MP3 cuts the size of the tracks in half without sacrificing sound quality. Thus an iPod nano can store up to 8000 tracks created by iGetMusic depending whether or not album covers are stored as well. Since some older MP3 players do not yet offer AAC Plus support, iGetMusic recommend using a free 3^rd party batch converter to convert the tracks to MP3.

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sharonbal Uncategorized AOL Radio, StreamRipper