SHOUTcast

I have rediscovered Shoutcast, a web site that has thousands of internet radio stations playing music 24 hours a day for free. You can find a station playing any type of music, many that you may not have heard before, such as: ambient chill, downtempo grove lounge and industrial gothic. For some reason, the most popular stations are techno and trance. I don't know who would want to listen to that music for more than five minutes without being on a dance floor jacked-up on some little pill. I like to find new, unique music that I have never heard before, found mostly on college radio stations. Yesterday I heard a song by Manic Street Preachers, a band that's been around for years that I have never heard of, and now I want to get a CD by them. I guess that's why some bands let their music get broadcast for free. One note, you really need a high-speed internet connection to listen to the music.

Another feature of Shoutcast is the ability for anyone to broadcast their own music. One simple way to do this is by using a Shoutcast server Winamp plug-in. I played a CD using Winamp, turned on the server, and my station was on the air. To verify this, I powered up my other, older and slow PC, whet to Shoutcast.com and searched for my station by name. There it was! There was about a ten second delay, but the music was playing to the whole world. I say simple, but it took me hours to get it working. But still, pretty neat. I couldn't keep my "station" up too long for two reasons. First, I was playing copyrighted music (specifically They Might Be Giants), and secondly, my ISP doesn't allow the use of local servers. Uploading music from a computer uses too much bandwidth, slowing down the whole network. Therefore, once I got the station working, I turned it off. Oh yeah. One more feature is the ability to DJ the songs by talking into the microphone. The downside is the inability to mix the microphone with the music; you have to switch back and forth.