Music Sites - Part Two - Five Sites for Audio Streams

I would not be surprised if I learned that there are thousands of them. That would be streaming music sites. What do you listen to while at your PC? I am going to share what I listen to. A comment from you telling myself and others what your choices are would be great.

I am drafting this post both for and because of my readers input. I love music. Yesterday, while drafting this post, I intentionally opened up my browser to a few music stream sites. I do not, honestly, spend much time on streaming audio sites. I find that my focus on Pick of the Day and The LumpCast mandate me screening downloaded material.

Please don’t think I never listen to streams though and do so only because I wanted to publish this. That is not the case, streams are a "break" from that same screening process. Certainly with the greater accessibility to broadband connections, streams offer a very nice "file free" method of enjoying music.

Today, I wish to focus on streams that are simple enough to find with a browser only. My goal is to find 5 decent streams that I can stream for a minimum of 1 hour with no bugs. I want to be able to surf, use IRC and draft this post while doing so. I already decided on 3 before I started this draft. Here they are:

Alligator Records - I like the blues. I have played several artist from the Alligator Records Label. You can check out those two shows First Pick of the Day or on 7 November, 2008. While the musical content is exceptional there are many things that I dislike about listening to streaming audio from this site. You can not change the page and surf the site without interrupting the stream. There is also no easy way to jump to an artist related site if you happen to discover him on the stream. I think that is a promotional must for a streaming site. Nonetheless, if you want to leave a single page open in a separate window and love the blues, you may wish to check this site out.

The SixtyOne - The SixtyOne is the stream that had most of my audio attention while drafting part one of this series. I had happend on it via search and it was also recommended by Lockergnome Writer, DogReader who is also involved with Flying Hamster. One of the kewlest things about this site is that you can browse it and not disrupt the stream. Artist information is available and it is easy to surf. The browse allows genre and sub genre search. Really a very nice user interface in my humble opinion. One could easily spend hours here.

WCLV - Music is often very personal. I grew up with radio. One of the stations I listened to very often was WCLV a very highly acclaimed classical music station. This is just one of my personal favorites I had to share. The bad thing is that it seems the feed is not Firefox friendly on a windows machine. They also offer OGG VORBIS format which works flawlessly on my Ubuntu Studio machine. If you are a Mcintosh user and happen to check them out, leave a comment regarding your experience. I would love to hear how well it works for you. I am sure that at least a few of your readers still listen to local radio via a stream. I would love to hear about them in a comment.

Pandora - I know that falls under the "Captain Obvious" category but one can not forget to mention Pandora. Although the site is not RIAA free, the like/dislike suggestions feature alone makes it worth a mention.

Live 365 - Captain Obvious number two. Live 365 offers a broad range of categories. I know several people who pay for the service and are very pleased with it. Having a pop out media player is, in my opinion, always a plus for a stream. The ad supported free stream is not annoying to the point that I can’t listen to it. Although the repetition of certain ads was getting to be annoying toward the end of the hour. Thanks to much selection, I rather enjoyed a "jazz banjo" channel.

Well folks there are 5 streaming sites I know of that worked for me. That is at least for one hour with my typical computer usage. Now if you know of any, and I am sure you do, comment here. Also if you are into them check out this excellent list of 30 Streaming Music Sites over at Mashable.

Some others I have tried and like include Beatles Radio and Last FM but my goal here is not to be all inclusive. That would require me to quit my day job. I drafted this post so that others could comment and add to it. Thanks for reading.