As with most country music fans, I'm always looking for new opportunities to listen to the music. Radio is ubiquitous, but there may not be a country station in a specific geographic location (horrors!) or reception may not be optimal. This month we'll explore a different way you can listen to country music on your PC while surfin' the Web.
PC Jukeboxes Flashback SoundFlashback Sound is in actuality a DJ service in East Central Missouri. Their web site provides two opportunities to listen to country music. The first is a link to live broadcasts of radio stations throughout the United States using RealAudio streaming (see below for a link to obtain the RealAudio plug-in). There are several genre choices available and, by following the country music link, there are five different stations listed from which to choose.
The second opportunity presented on the home page is to a jukebox also using RealAudio streaming. Up to 140 different songs are played sequentially after a brief audio site introduction. Although the audio came through using a 20.0 kbps stereo stream (which is pretty good since most of the time you encounter 16 kbps mono streams), there seemed to be "holes" in the audio. These "holes" caused more breaks in the sound than you would encounter from the usual stream buffering. I also suspect that this jukebox is meant as a means to sample the DJ mixing talent as after listening to two older country selections, the third song was from Fleetwood Mac.
This site is probably worth a visit, but whether you come back or not may depend on how broad your taste in music is. I suspect that every visit will encounter the same music in the same order.
Imagine RadioImagine Radio provides the listener to hear random selections from one of a variety of different musical genres, one of course being country. There are several pages to explore at the web site that explains the service and the listening choices. The last thing you need to do after exploring the service information is to download a special player program (the "tuner") that rides on top of the RealAudio streaming. What you actually download is a small setup program. That, when executed, downloads a rather large (approximately 1.8 megabytes) program to your desktop. It is available in both Win95 and Mac versions.
When you launch the tuner, it obtains a connection to your Internet service provider. The first time it is launched, it provides you with an audio tour of the tuner functionality and the various controls available. You can then customize the tuner and replace the tour/help button with one of the other available selection choices. The controls that are on the tuner provide six different "channel" selections, a slider that allows you to rate the song from 0 to 10, a pull-down tab that is used to customize the tuner, and a display that provides information on the current song as well as some bothersome advertising. The purpose of the tuner is to improve the quality of the RealAudio streaming and provide the listener an opportunity to rate the music presented. Supposedly, songs or artists that receive lower ratings will not be presented in the stream as often as those with higher ratings.
Go To Page: 1 2
