Send to KindleTwo years ago, very good friends of ours bought me an amazing present, a Roady 2 XM Radio player, along with a monthly subscription. I had thought about getting one before they got it for me. It’s a relatively obvious thing for people who spend as much time in the car as we do. I didn’t get it because I didn’t research it enough to realize that you could install it yourself in under 3 minutes! I assumed it would require professional installation…
Anyway, we’ve been enjoying it mightily ever since (as I said above, for 2 years). About a year ago, I was curious to check out the accompanying service on the Net to listen live to the same stations. I never got around to doing it for a number of reasons, most notably because I never bothered to ask my friends for the login information to manage the account.
This past weekend, we were visiting them, and I got the info, and have successfully set up my account to listen live online. Wow! It’s simply too cool! In addition to being able to listen to an amazing variety of music all day long (which is what I’ve been doing while working here at Zope all day today), you can see what’s playing live on all the stations at once through the web. That means that even if I’m enjoying a song, if I notice that another station is playing a favorite of mine, or an artist I’ve always wanted to check out, with a single click, I’m there, listening to it.
They stream at 32kpbs, so it doesn’t soak up any bandwidth whatsoever (if you’re on a broadband connection, and if you’re not, stop reading my posts!) 😉
The only (incredibly minor) disappointment is that they don’t have all of the stations available online. One example is the main Country station (#11). No biggie, but worth mentioning.
Anyway, my only regret is not having enabled this last year…
P.S. Did I mention that this is a free service if you are an existing subscriber with a real XM Radio receiver? That makes it even cooler. Of course, if you don’t have an XM Radio, you might find this worth subscribing to as your primary Net Radio service 🙂
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