BIT-101

Background

I started buying music in the 70s. Vinyl. Not because it was cool, but because that’s how you bought music. It was either that or 8-track tapes. I never had an 8-track player. I had a record player. We didn’t call them “turntables”. We called them record players. Again, it wasn’t trendy. That’s just how it was. I wound up with a respectable vinyl library.

Cassettes were a thing too, but nobody bought music on cassette. You bought vinyl and recorded it to cassettes if you wanted to play it in your car. Walkmans (Walkmen???) weren’t a thing just yet, but they were around the corner. When I got a car, I invested in a decent car stereo with a cassette player and recorded many of my favorite albums and those cassettes lived in my car.

I left home early and at some point I wound up selling all my vinyl to eat. Sad. I still had my cassettes though. And I gave up my car and bought a Walkman. Not a real Sony Walkman, but a series of Walkman clones. That’s when I started buying new cassettes. I built up a respectable cassette library.

Then came CDs. I didn’t buy into that format though. I’d borrow my friends’ CDs and record them to cassettes.

Then came MP3s. I bought the first commercially available MP3 Player, the Diamond Rio PMP300.

Over the next many years I got rid of my cassettes (I don’t actually remember what I did with them) and built up a decent library of MP3s. And in the last bunch of years I’ve been upgrading those MP3s to lossless FLACs. I have a Jellyfin server at home, with TailScale, so I can access that music anywhere. And I have a few high res portable digital audio players.

So I’m in pretty good shape with my own personal music library.

Streaming

But sometimes I want to just turn something on and let it choose the music for me. Music that I may not have in my collection. Music that I may never heard of.

When I was growing up, this was called FM radio. It’s still an option, but it’s limited by the stations in your area. Even in a decent city like Boston, those options are very limited. And oh god, the ads. There have been times I’ve gotten in my car and driven somewhere 15 minutes away and only heard one song and a bunch of ads. And don’t get me started on those “morning shows”.

So there are streaming services. Spotify I never really loved, but I did subscribe to Tidal for a while off and on. But those are all about building playlists. You can listen to someone else’s playlist, which is kind of like radio, but not really. And, I don’t want to pay a monthly fee. I want radio, but not just local radio.

Internet Radio

Of course I’m no stranger to internet radio. I’ve dabbled over the years. Shoutcast, Ice, Pandora, others.

And I’ve been a big fan of SomaFM for ages and regularly throw them a donation to do my bit to keep them going.

A month or two I decided to go all in on Internet Radio though. I started with an Android app, that I used on an old Pixel phone hooked up via Bluetooth to my stereo. The app I got is called Radio Mobi.

I started with the free version and loved it so much I upgraded immediately. I use it in the car and I use it during work and usually go to sleep listening to it. It kind of took over my music listening world. There are many thousands of stations with every language, location, genre, time period, etc. that you can imagine. I have dozens of favorite stations saved, and bounce between them as the mood hits.

Hardware

The app on the phone via Bluetooth into my stereo was decent, but I was ready to commit to something more permanent. I wanted a dedicated Internet Radio receiver. I spent a good week or more looking over listings and reviews and Youtube videos. And finally settled on the Ocean Digital WR-800.

This device sits on top of my stereo receiver/amplifier. It has its own speakers which are so-so, but it has line out which goes into my stereo system, so I don’t use the built-in speakers. It’s on my home WIFI and I’ve got all the same stations saved as I do on Radio Mobi (give or take).

I turn it on when I start working in the morning and mute it when I’m in meetings. The stations change with my moods.

On June 17 (6/17), a local college radio station had 617 Day. 617 is the telephone area code for the Boston area. So they played all local music. It was fantastic and I learned of a couple new bands and found a new favorite, Slothrust (Slo Thrust? Sloth Rust? You choose) and bought one of their albums.

Many of the hardware internet receivers you’ll buy use a service called Skytune. A nice thing about this service is you can discover stations at that site, and send them to your receiver. When the radio is on, it sets up a local web server on your network where you can manage your station library, add new streams that aren’t in the Skytune network, arrange and manage them, remove stations, start or stop a station, change the volume, etc.

You can do all that on the device itself, but doing it on a computer or phone is great too.

The device also has:

• FM Radio. I don’t use it because A. my stereo system has a better FM receiver. B. I now listen to local stations via their stream anyway - perfect reception.
• SD card playback. I don’t use it because I have other solutions.
• Media Center, aka DLNA/UPNP. Nah.

I just use the internet radio function and it’s fantastic.

Just remembered…

I just recalled that some years ago I tried this experiment with a different device. The CCrane CC Wifi Internet Radio.

This thing is crap. Horrible UX, many unworking stations, horrible sound quality. I used it briefly than didn’t touch it for years. Tried to use it again recently and I couldn’t get a single station on it. Must have changed server configs or something. I trashed it.

Weirdly, the Ocean Digital I just bought was only $10 more than the CC WIFI I bought eight years ago.

Summary

Ditch Spotify! Discover internet radio. You won’t go back. Use the money to buy music.

Actually, I don’t like telling people what they should or shouldn’t do. But I recommend trying it out. You might love it.