As I began the Learn list for Thing 42, I had Creative Media Source playing the latest Prince three-cd album Lotusflow3r. Creative Media Player was the default when I loaded the cd's, and I used it to copy the three discs to the pc. Do I plan to share on the internet? No.
I have digitized several hundred albums, and copied to our pc's from our private collections. I have vinyl albums I gave to my mother in the 50's, reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, and cd's. I have over 200 cylinder records for our 1915 Edison Amberola, with no other way to digitize than to play them and record with a mic.
More often than not I will use iTunes to listen to anything on the pc. I'm impressed with the internet radio features. I do not plan to get an iPod or an iPhone, and do not need one for internet radio.
I also like Windows Media Player. Today I worked my way through Reciva Radio Portal. It's a multi-step process to find and sort a genre, click on a selection, choose a player (even though iTunes is my default), and hope there is something to hear. Several attempts failed. One thing Windows Media Player does is show you an icon while it attempts to play whatever you select. iTunes and Firefox together give you a small Reciva window that does nothing if there is nothing to hear. iTunes works great as a standalone internet radio application.
iTunes Radio button gives you a complete list of genres with dropdown menus, including most of the stations I found on Reciva. iTunes shows the kilobytes per second speed for each station. Some of the stations offer a range of streaming rates. I found 128 kps works sometimes and other times has too many pauses to fill the buffer. 256 kps HD stations require true broadband speed (see comments further down). Slower speeds work fine for talk radio; 64 kps is adequate for music. I quickly built a radio playlist I called Radio. Click and drag any station I like to the playlist, while I'm listening to it, and all the stations I want are ready to go next time. All of the station choices presented by iTunes worked.
I mentioned CATVids in another blog post as the most complete library cataloguing software for media of all kinds.
Internet radio we have not used much on our pc's, because true broadband service is not available in Little Marais. We're lucky to get a strong signal from Verizon National Access broadband. Signal strength varies from about 250 to 800 kilobytes per second. 800 is great, but not fast enough for some YouTube or Hulu TV on the internet. True broadband by definition should be greater than 1.2 megabytes per second. The speed via Verizon varies from minute to minute and from station to station.
Bring my pc to my neighbor's house 600 feet to the east and you can't get Verizon. AT&T installed a cellphone tower two miles west, but won't offer wireless broadband without political coercion from the Lake County Board. Your iPhone or iPod works fine here. QWEST has fiber optics underground along Hwy 61, but wants at least $4000 to bring broadband service to your house. Legislation and funding for wireless infrastructure isn't as simple as laying more cable and building more towers. Arguments for supporting small, rural populations, the potential for job growth, educational and business development, and 50,000 tourists driving through on a summer weekend are dismissed.
In the past couple of years, most of my music purchases have been online via iTunes. If I want the physical album, I still go back to Amazon.com. How green things have gotten! The Judy Collins album my wife bought for me last week had minimal packaging, published eight years ago. It still had a sleeve we threw out to get at the jewel case. The Prince album had a slim three-slot fold-over cover. Much of what we buy online, we download. No packaging unless we burn a cd to keep in the car.
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