response 172 of 210:

Nov 16 16:47 UTC 2000

Oops, right.  I confused WKAR and WUOM.

response 174 of 210:

Nov 16 16:48 UTC 2000

(several responses slipped in.  The price of research.  :) )

response 176 of 210:

Nov 16 20:54 UTC 2000

There are two subscription services for digital radio from satellites
which are supposed to go live Real Soon Now.  I'm not sure what's holding
up the debut of the services; the last news article I saw talked about 
the radio presenters they were hiring and their differing programming
philosophies.   I thought the services were supposed to be up and 
running this year.   Probably there are delays in getting the receivers
-- mostly car-based -- to market.

I have only heard rumors about vague plans for digital terrestrial
broadcasting in the USA:  the FCC would like to reclaim today's 
FM band by moving everyone to digital systems, similar to the planned 
shift to HDTV for television.  My guess is that we are 5-10 years 
away from any such service.   Canada is supposed to moving forward 
briskly on digital land-based broadcasting.
 
Low power FM broadcasting is mired in political controversy.  
Congress, at the direction of the broadcast industry, is trying to 
pass a law to make the whole plan illegal.  Clinton is vowing to veto
any bill this is slipped into.  I don't know what the next president's
position on this will be.

My suggestion for your gaps: do what I do, tape some broadcasts off 
the net onto any handy cassette recorder and use those tapes to fill up  
the empty time.

response 178 of 210:

Nov 17 02:29 UTC 2000

It's a political issue because it threatens to take audience away from the
current broadcasters, who have spent money for the privilege of broadcast,
are making money broadcasting, and so have money to give to legislators to
make it a political issue.

Last I heard, those off-shore broadcasters were violating international
treaties on use of the electromagnetic spectrum.  That could easily be
defined as "piracy" and punished accordingly.  (Earlier this evening,
I (re-)read the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to
define piracy.)

response 180 of 210:

Nov 17 23:18 UTC 2000

Low power broadcasting is actually a rather active topic currently.  The
National Association of Broadcasters is fighting low power licences, claiming
intereference with their signals by amateur equipment.  Advocates for low
power licensing point out that it currently costs several million to get any
kind of broadcast license, since all the currently allowable high power
licenses are already owned.

response 182 of 210:

Nov 20 14:40 UTC 2000

In general, broadcasters are losing interest in the AM band.
Most listeners seem to reject AM for music listening; almost all AM 
stations are now used for programs of people talking.
Most AM stations have gone to the cheapest possible programming, 
nationally syndicated talk shows.
What little music survives on AM seems to be mostly either swing-era pop,
or ethnic music aimed at immigrant communities.  
 
For a while, WJR was playing Detroit Symphony shows on weekend evenings
after the Detroit commercial classical station folded.  But that seems 
to have stopped; there is no mention of it on WJR's web site.
 
MSU's NPR station WKAR plays an evening of jazz for the same reason 
they play an evening of folk music; they feel a responsibility to cover 
some musical fields which have no commercial presence on the dial in 
Lansing.  The underlying problem is that there is only one noncommercial
channel in the market, but there are lots more noncommercial types of 
music needing an outlet; this is the problem that we're hoping 
some sort of digital radio system will solve.

response 184 of 210:

Nov 21 16:57 UTC 2000

There is - or was, last time I was in its receiving range in the 
daytime, which isn't often - an AM-only classical station in San 
Francisco, but that's because they sold the FM outlet, closed 
themselves down, and then changed their minds and restarted on the AM 
station they still had.

I was very impressed with WGUC when I visited Cincinnati, so that's the 
classical station I usually listen to when I want a web broadcast.  I'm 
sure there are other good ones, but one at a time is enough for me.

I actually prefer listening to music than voices on the web, and not 
just because they only place I like to listen to radio talk is in the 
car, where I have no web capacity.  To my ear, voices tend to break up 
very audibly, while music is not so obviously low-fidelity.  But I may 
just have a bad ear.

response 186 of 210:

Nov 21 19:58 UTC 2000

So why is UofM wasting its FM capabilities on talk?
BigNet (formerly MichCom) is now selling DSL lines for $10 more than the cost
of a phone line plus ISP service (if you contract for 2 years).  This might
be the solution - fast connection that does not tie up the phone line and has
no dependence on a flaky Shiva dialler (which RealAudio said is what the
problem was when I kept disconnecting while trying to listen).  This ISP is
now offering shell accounts that you can access either dialup from Michigan
(as mich.com used to) or by DSL line from anywhere in the US.  There must be
some way to do streaming MP3 without Windows.

response 188 of 210:

Nov 22 05:11 UTC 2000

That's because there are administrators at UM that are more interested
in quantity than in quality. What does "steep decline" mean? Good
programming, adequately supported *by the institution* remains good
programming. Reducing the quality of the programming and showing an
increase in listeners and contributions doesn't mean anything, except that
that is the nature of people - quality always loses to quantity, *unless
one has a policy opposing that*. UM did not.

One really should look at the number of people that *don't* listen to
WUOM. By what percentage was that reduced by the change in programming?
I'd say the change in programming made an almost imperceptible change
in the percentage that don't listen, even though it brought in more $$$
to UM's coffers.

response 190 of 210:

Nov 22 18:35 UTC 2000

That is precisely what happened. That also gives us those seemingly
endless, repetitive, fund-raising weeks. I'm surprised that those forced
to do those don't commit suicide more often. What do they get out of being
so upbeat and cheerful for a week or so? Their salary, presumably, but
their real profession is usually not show business, and having to grovel
and dance for their dinner must be demeaning to many of them. Do you
really think they are all really doing it just for the "cause"? The
"cause"  being, being able to buy canned programming from NPR?

response 192 of 210:

Nov 24 18:30 UTC 2000

Sirius has three classical channels, gosh.  Netradio (www.netradio.com) 
has at least eight.  Besides an opera channel, they have two chamber 
music channels (one for piano music, one for everything else), two 
symphonic channels (one for actual symphonies, one for other stuff 
which appears to be mostly light classics), two early music channels 
(one called "Chant", god help us, and one more general), and something 
called "Quiet Classics".

There was an article in _The New Republic_ recently, at 
http://www.tnr.com/online/goldberg071000.html, complaining that the 
proliferation of micro-market net radio stations is destroying a sense 
of general community.  I can't see that as a wholly bad thing: "general 
community" too often means "lowest common denominator", though to be 
fair the author had stations like KPFA in mind.  Still, I never listen 
to stations like that, because they're too damn eclectic: I have no 
idea what kind of thing I'm likely to get.

The article mentioned sonicnet, in a disparaging way as the ultimate in 
solipsism for its support of personal stations, but I was intrigued 
enough to go over and check it out.  I have to say I liked what I saw, 
and set up my own station for my non-classical tastes.  If you haven't 
seen it, they give you a list of a couple dozen genres and subgenres (I 
had no idea that "East Coast Rap" and "West Coast Rap" were different 
subgenres) which you can use to make a rough choice, and then you can 
adjust individual artists in those genres on a 0-5 scale.  I tinkered 
with a few (up with Renaissance, out with Rod Stewart), but otherwise 
left it alone, mostly because most of the performers are people I've 
never heard, or even heard of.

So what I like about this setup is not so much my control over the 
music as the opportunity to hear new music that I might like, without 
either having to tread through broadcast pop radio sludge, or hunt down 
things on the web for myself.  If I like or dislike something new, I 
can change the settings, and any given song that annoys you, you can 
just press the skip button and get on to the next one.  How I wish I 
could do _that_ on broadcast radio!

response 194 of 210:

Nov 30 22:55 UTC 2000

There is a link to sonicnet from the New Republic article, but I should 
have put it in.  The home page is radio.sonicnet.com.

You can choose from pre-set stations or invent your personal station.  
You do this by picking a couple favorite genres from a list (I'd advise 
against more than that: it waters down your selection too much), which 
then generates a list of performers at 1-5 stars, which you can then 
adjust to personal preference.  (For instance, I love folk but I hate 
Dylan, so zero stars for him.)  You can also add other artists 
individually, even ones not on the pre-set list, if they're in the 
database.

Every time you log on, the system creates a playlist from your current 
list of artists, weighted by current number of stars.  You can skip to 
the next selection at any time.  There's no choice of individual albums 
or songs: in practice you hear mostly recent releases or re-releases 
(putting Thompson at 5 stars means I'm getting a lot from "Mock 
Tudor"), punctuated by occasional Office Depot and Slim Jim commercials.

I think it's pretty cool, though I wouldn't want it to be my only web 
station.  Fidelity at 56K is not too great.

response 196 of 210:

Dec 14 19:26 UTC 2000

Keesan - Possibly your connection is too slow, though I use Sonicnet on 
a 56K modem without any problem about things loading.  Maybe it was 
just a bad day.  Try again?

I don't quite follow why you think you accidentally added "Blues" when 
you then got a list of Bach, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, which suggests 
you did indeed get the classical section.

They have some pre-set classical stations on the service, too: you can 
find them under a link labeled "Radio Sonicnet Stations" at the top of 
the page, or from a pull-down menu labeled "Choose a station."

But if your classical tastes are as picky and idiosyncratic as mine, 
and you still want to create your own station, let me try to describe 
the process in more detail.  What you get when you log on and ask to 
create a station is a list of genres, with a set of radio buttons 
labeled 0-5 after each of them.  To create an all-classical station, 
leave all the other genres at 0 and put the one classical genre 
(called "Classical and Romantic") at 4 or 5.

Clicking OK at the bottom should, as I recall, take you to the page 
listing a bunch of composers of the 1750-1900 era, each with 0-5 stars 
after them.  You can edit your preferences by clicking on a name, which 
causes another little window to pop up with a set of the radio buttons 
on it.  Pick your choice and confirm.

Then, if you want to add composers from outside this period - there are 
a lot of performers/composers from all genres in the database who are 
not in the genre lists - do a "Search by Artist" and type in the 
composer's name.  A list of names fitting that word string will come 
up, and you click on the name as above.

As for technical requirements, the only ones I know of are in "Player 
Settings", which offers a choice between "Modem" and "DSL/ISDN Cable 
Modem/T1", and another choice between Windows Media Player, RealPlayer 
G2, and "I don't care".