Category: radio

Internet radio apps on the Windows desktop and Android

There are frankly a lot of Internet radio apps that curate radio stations internationally and make use of a free database on radio-browser.info. There are only 3 that I am aware of that have worked well for me: Elisa, Foobar2000, and VLC Media Player. I wish to compare each of them in this article. I will go in order from the strongest apps to the weakest.

vlc-foobar-elisa

VLC. It is actually difficult to say whether VLC or Foobar is the best, since both have strengths and weaknesses. I’ll go with VLC in first place, since it is strong on Windows, Linux desktop, and the Android. It uses Icecast to collect its radio stations, and does the job so well, that deciding on the radio station you want out of the thousands available becomes a chore unless you know exactly what you want. The stations are available without further adjustments, but you do not get station icons or logos. The difficulty with VLC is that, even after you have curated some stations into a playlist of radio stations, and save the playlist, you still have to go hunting around your filesystem to find it again. There is no quick way to retrieve the list. Also, a strange bug is that it causes my keyboard to stop working, or at least to only work sporadically.

VLC also has an Android version which has made it my favourite media player for my smartphone. The interface is well laid-out and easy to figure out; it has internet radio which remembers your favourite stations. It can also play a variety of media formats.

Foobar2000. Foobar2000 uses radio-browser.info to serve its list, and like VLC, you get a vast list of radio stations. But this list is searchable, and if you select a station, it remembers the station the next time you run the program. Unlike VLC, your list of selected stations is automatically reloaded. Both VLC and Foobar2000 have the ability to quickly load and play a station once selected, but Foobar is the faster of the two. Under Linux, Foobar tends to bring Wayland (the replacement window server that supersedes X-Windows) to its knees, causing it to restart abruptly. This experience causes me to mistrust the stability in either OS. It is playing right now under Windows and isn’t causing problems at the moment.

Elisa is last on this list, for two reasons: it is a bear to configure for internet radio, and stations are slow to load. But its high point is that, while stations have to be manually inserted one at a time, you can load icons or logos of the stations for easier visual recognition, and after an hour or two, you can have a list of 20 or 30 of your favourite stations that will always show up when you run the program. The icons also add to the visual appeal of the app over VLC and Foobar2000. But it means you have to go to radio-browser.info yourself and get busy with copy-paste. The other downside is that Elisa appears to be an app that was made for playing stored media from your device. I have disabled the feature since I have other apps that do the job better, and primarly used it as my first internet radio app before I discovered what was in VLC and Foobar2000.

The most annoying sound on radio

This picture was shot at Square One … no, in Vaughan, no, in Scarborough, … Edmonton?, … oh, well… they all look alike.

Why do jewellery commercials have to be so tasteless and annoying? I single out jewellery commericals, since they are more annoying even then furniture commercials, their main competitor for the gold standard of tastelessness.

But no. We have sharpers like Russell Oliver, and others who will go on TV and radio and in the most garish manner known to man, tell you how you can trade in your jewellery for cash, in a way that seems to rob your most prized possessions of all the dignity and memory they once had. But I don’t believe he is the worst.

On the radio station I listen to, which doesn’t play a lot of ads, I admit, there is that infernal commercial from Spence Diamonds. Oh, that Scream! I didn’t know that it has been dubbed the “Spence Scream”, and even hashtagged #SpenceScream since at least 2014. It has even attracted some imitators, and an attempt had been made to vote it out of existence (Spence didn’t listen and it still persists to this afternoon). Since it was Spence that initiated the vote, I believe that maybe they thought it was too memorable, and couldn’t come up with a less annoying idea.

I am annoyed because I am already married, been there, done that. Having been through it, it is a tad degrading to hear it. The marriage (mine, at least), was about love. Clearly, Spence is agaisnt this idea. They want it to be about their diamonds.

Curiously, the comment sections of the YouTube videos of Spence promos have curiously well-worded and lucid critiques of Spence’s advertising practices. These are not your normal trolls. These apparently well-educated and erudite people seemed to have a lot of time on their hands, and are gravely preoccupied with dignity and class.

I think: look, the couple sounds very much in-character on the radio, just get rid of the scream.

The demise of 1050 CHUM Radio

Here in Toronto, there has been a radio station that has historically been one of the most highly rated stations in Canada. Around the late 80s/early 90s, it changed format and severely lowered the power of the transmitter to the point where the reception remained poor, even in Toronto. Recently, there is no music anymore, not even the obscure oldies that I was accustomed to hearing. CHUM had been an all-music station for the almost all of the past 50 years (they were an all-sports station for less than a year in the early 2000s).

Instead, what I have been hearing in the past couple of weeks has consisted of nothing more than an on-air audio feed of City Pulse, the audio feed of our local cable all-news station.  How far we’ve fallen. From fast-talking DJs to fast-talking news reporters referring to imagery you can’t see without a television.

CTV-GlobeMedia, after purchasing CHUM Limited, probably nuked the old format because of licensing laws. They likely own just enough media (newspapers, radio, TV) in the Toronto market that won’t quite land them in jail, or in a lawsuit. The National Post assures us, however, that the advertising is different from CP24’s. And I think they have a radio-only weekend show.

Nowadays, a google search for CHUM AM or 1050 CHUM results in the website for CP24 occuring at the top. CTV GlobeMedia acquired CHUM and CP24, while the rest of CHUM Limited got sold to Rogers, including CITY-TV. Until the sale, CHUM Limited was the world’s largest privately-owned broadcaster. CHUM Limited used to also own several radio and TV stations across Canada.

Many people, including myself, will wonder what will happen to the weekly CHUM Charts, which were archived at CHUM’s website. It is an historical archive of what Canadians have been listening to since the 50s. In my opinion, an important bit of Canadiana. An attempt to follow a link set by another blogger resulted in a redirection to CP24. Entering “CHUM Chart” as a search string yielded nothing. In removing the archive, they are removing our collective memory of what made the charts over the past 50 years in the Toronto area.

Some sites that obtained chart info from the CHUM Top 30: Craig Smith (only lists #1 singles). The historical property at 1331 Yonge Street, home to 1050 CHUM since 1959, has now been sold to a condo developer, and the station facilities have now been moved to a new site to coexist with CHUM-FM, on 25o Richmond St W.

CHUM has existed as a radio station since 1944, and was the first radio station in Canada to run an all Top-40 format in the mid 1950s.