Online Radio

The Internet caters to a wide spectrum of entertainment-seekers and in various ways and means. For the music-lover, everything has changed since the net came into existance. Instead of getting one’s favourite music from the neighbourhood music store, one can now download almost any song off the internet. The advent of internet radio was also not far and before long, there were truckloads of sites offering streaming audio to the people, for free of course!!!

 

What is the scene in india, one may ask? A quick Google Search leads us to a multitude of sites that offer streaming radio off the net. As far as i remember, IndiaFM was amongst the first to offer streaming audio on their site. then came SmasHits, Radio Sargam , Raaga and many more. Nowadays, there are uncountable sites that listeners can open up in their web-browser and listen to their favourite songs, just at the click of a mouse button. Among all this, the contribution of RealPlayer from RealNetworks can’t be ignored. Though Windows Media Player was the ’sane’ choice for many, the sheer compression ratio that was acheiveable in RealPlayer,thus reducing the size of the audio file, made it very popular.

 

Now the trends have started changing and one no longer has to visit the respective sites to listen to music. There are utilities availabe for download that connect to various radio stations and play the music of your choice. Of Course, you need an active (and fast) internet connection! Yahoo! Widgets‘ Personal Radio Tuner is the one that I use regularly to listen to streaming radio. Just enter the URL of the stream and you’re done. Another Nifty li’l utility that I came across recently is the ‘Worldwide Indian FM Radio‘, which comes across as a small 180KB download that silently resides in the Taskbar and plays the stream of your choice. One has to manually list out the streams in a txt file and the player will incorporate them as a drop-down menu one can choose from. Simple! Workplaces would never be the same again!

Update: Wanna tune into FM Radio over the Net? Click here to know how!