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Baroque Around The Clock! And All That Hip Hop...
Using your browser to locate the best radio stations for streaming classical music and other genres
Classical music lovers may feel rather left out by some of the more recent developments in streaming music over the internet.
The Dutch certainly know how to do high quality continuous online streaming radio. For instance, Baroque around the Clock is a rather high quality (256 Kbps) stream and would be a personal pick among these streaming radio stations from the Netherlands. No advertisements or chit chat - just an excellent, varied selection of baroque classical music - to open try clicking the bitrate link on the right hand side of the page (or go via the site itself).
But maybe baroque and classical (discussed below) aren't quite your thing? Dutch network AVRO offers a good selection of other classical music stations at a slightly lower but still very acceptable bitate (128 Kbps), but there's plenty to suit different tastes. As I write this I'm hearing some BrandX on JazzRadio2 from the Hague. And there are plenty of other places to go.
The internet radio search engine from multilingualaudiobooks comes complete with an interactive world map and provides a particularly convenient way of locating internet streaming radio (or television) by nation, genre ("filetype"), language etc.
The multilingualaudiobooks search engine seems to me more informative and user friendly than the better known radio-locator, which however can also be convenient for searching by genre.
Entering "Hip Hop" in the multilingualaudiobooks search engine brings up a larger clutch of stations with live feeds (some inevitably with advertising). The results were popular enough around the house.
To listen to these online streams you'll need to have the necessary codecs installed. You may also like to listen in an online audio or multimedia player such as Foobar or the KMPlayer which conveniently text what's being broadcast.
Multilingualaudiobooks helpfully provides bitrate values for each station and allows you to select alternative bitrates when available. Lower bitrates may be useful with slower connections.
A note about how to locate the best free classical music radio stations on the internet:
There's a wealth of quality stations streaming classical music that can be accessed for free through the internet. For instance, classical music programs from BBC Radio 3 can be accessed in good quality audio though BBC's Listen Again iPlayer service which lets you stream radio programs from the last week for free from anywhere in the world (in addition to live radio broadcasts). Listeners comfortable with languages other than English may also enjoy Swiss Radio, Radio France, some German stations or the Hungarian Radio Bartok (more live European stations listed here). And you can find more by playing around with Radio Beta's advanced search engine or by consulting this handy classical music internet radio directory from ClassicalWebcast.com.
Got a favourite you'd like to share? Leave your suggestion below or at:
How To Locate The Best Free Radio Stations Streaming Classical Music
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Comments
I believe RadioSure deserves a review of its own since it's so far above any radio application I have ever used.
You can easily search through the database in your browser, and unlike the other sites mentioned in the article, you can combine search terms freely. E.g. a search for "classical usa" resulted in 211 stations, whereas the same search on Radio Locator only came up with 122 stations. If you add your state to search, e.g. "classical usa pa" you can easily find local radio stations.
What especially makes it so great is that the users themselves can easily suggest corrections and additions to the station database, which currently lists over 18,600 stations! Crowd-sourcing will always win over a closed database. Out-of-date radio links where the main problem in apps such as Screamer Radio, this is now solved.
Search here: http://www.radiosure.com/stations
If you like dance floor music I would recommend the Swedish web-radio Radio Seven at http://www.radioseven.org/
They are streaming high quality music and support webplayer, winamp, android and iPhone.
Radioseven is based on a non-profit organisation which over the years have developed the small web based hobby station into the largest one in Sweden.
Radioseven is a CHR-Rythmic station focused on electronic dance, trance and house. We offer the latest tunes within these genres with some flashbacks from the 90’s. Typical Radioseven artists are Basic Element, Milk Inc, Cascade, Eric Prytz and Tiësto.
{Moderator's Comment: Link to non English language site removed.}
This comment reads like an advertisement and will probably be deleted.
My brothers station is up there! Going 11 years strong based in LA. www.Dublab.com
Thanks
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU--Gizmo, Rhiannon
Hi Bob,
nice to see some links to Dutch stations. We're pretty well served with something for everyone here.
www.radio4.nl (functionally translatable with google translate) offers a very interesting live stream as well, together with something called 'plaatpaal' where you can listen to live stream classical albums.
The same goes for www.radio6.nl. This site offers a choice of different Jazz/Soul and related music, also with a, this time called 'luisterpaal', where you can listen to contemporary Dutch Jazz albums.
just wanted to let yous know how lucky we are :-)
Thank you casparvan. Sounds good, I'm listening in to the interesting Dutch Radio 6 Jazz station. It really does have remarkably clear audio. Yes, Google Translate is a real Swiss army knife of a tool, and it makes stations in different languages much more accessible. Though "Jazz" is "Jazz"... even in esperanto, I guess :)
If you download the free Winamp media player you can tune-in to Shoutcast Radio via the Media Library, which gives you the opportunity to select the particular genre of music you wish to listen to. No malware signalled by a variety of recommended security products on this site and the visualiser is quite impressive.
I tend to find myself listening to Nirvana Radio late on in the day, but there is a huge variety of stations to select from. It can also be accessed via smartphones and PSPs.
I think this useful feature from BBC's Click indirectly shows up how classical music doesn't get much of a look in on many of the latest internet listening sites and apps. That's one reason why I believe that sites such as those linked to in this article still have a place for listeners wanting to find the best internet radio stations for their preferred genres of art music (classical or otherwise). And it's also prompted me to draft this brief tutorial/list dedicated to finding the best classical music stations online.
Radio sure got great reviews at snapfiles, and I wanted to try it, but at virustotal, 6 scanners said it was infected...
http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/report.html?id=5280714908d4629c48392d7419c0678b15e10ab82e3f98e0a76b2698c9173d3d-1297452425
What do you guys think ? Is the program gathering personal data or is it triggering the 6 AV programs due to the nature of the way the program works ??
Radio Sure is fine.
There are many ways that a given executable could end-up triggering certain anti-virus products...
...including that some software authors of completely legitimate software (that's in no way virus-infected) sometimes use the same IDE and/or compilers and/or linkers that virus authors use.
When that's the case, sometimes anti-malware tools will be fooled. That's why it's important to use more than one tool; and I, personally stay away from the web-based/browser-based tools. The only tools that are truly reliable are ones that you download and install as desktop (as opposed to browser-based) applications; and then, of course, one must keep them, and their malware database files, completely and constantly up-to-date (which most of them keep track of and do for you, automatically, in the background).
Trust me when I tell you that Radio Sure is as clean as a whistle. I use Comodo Internet Security, Malware Bytes, and SuperAntiSpyware. I also have (and use, when I'm in doubt) several manual scan-only products like the one from Kaspersky. I've tested Radio Sure's files with all of them and they're squeaky clean. I've even used ComboFix on this machine in the recent past (to resolve a completely unrelated issue) and all of the Radio Sure files survived (and anyone who knows ComboFix knows that NOTHING bad can survive it).
So fear not Radio Sure. It's only impediments are a couple of behavioral characteristics (having to do with how the program notifies of updates, and how it is closed to the system tray) which, talk about coincidence, I was just discussing with the Radio Sure guys this very day (and, with any luck, they'll implement my suggestions with the next version).
In my research (which is considerable), Radio Sure is the hands-down best of its type of product...
...and I say that from the perspective of a long-time Screamer Radio user who'd still be using it if Radio Sure hadn't come out... and, over time, gotten so good.
_______________________________
Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
The RadioSure website (http://www.radiosure.com/) is kosha and gets the green light from WOT and several others, including SiteAdvisor and Norton. Furthermore, the AV scanners which flagged "malware" in the VirusTotal read out all seemed to identify different offenders. So I suspect they're probably false positives, linked to the characteristics of the program.
Hope this helps. However, I'm no security expert and if you still feel doubtful, feel free to seek advice over on Gizmo's Freeware Forum: http://www.techsupportalert.com/freeware-forum/general-computer-support/
I've been using RadioSure for months now, and many virus/malware scans have been run on this machine since i downloaded it: none flagged up RadioSure as containing malware of any type.
Thanks for this Des. I really can't comment on the matters you raise. Maybe internet could be a separate best freeware internet streaming radio software could be a category of its own.
I wrote the present article just to recommend a good internet radio search engine in tandem with the excellent Baroque Around The Clock and some other quality Dutch streaming radio stations.
I think your points about commercial decay make these stations from the Dutch network AVRO even more worthy of recommendation. For instance, Baroque Around The Clock has an inteligent selection of interesting and attractive baroque / early classical music (stretching well beyond Viavaldi's Four seasons, etc). The music is streamed uninterrupted at a high bit rate with no advertising. Furthermore, unlike ClassicFM, for example, it always streams complete pieces rather than truncated highlights. You can listen in your browser or stream the music (and 'capture' if you want) in a free media player like KMPlayer, etc.
True, for classical music there are plenty of other excellent but rather different stations to explore, including BBC Radio 3, which you can listen to through the Listen Again iPlayer service. People happy with languages other than English may enjoy Swiss Radio, Radio France, some German stations or the Hungarian Radio Bartok.
Classical webcast provides a classical music internet radio directory : http://classicalwebcast.com/
Listening to a New Zealand station from the other side of the world made me think of the magic of the early days of radio tuning... somewhat before my time though!
Hi, Bob. I didn't see this posting by you (to which I'm now replying) back when you made it in 2009. And I've only come back to this page today because it showed-up in a Tech Treats email newsletter that showed-up today 5 March 2011).
I certainly didn't mean, in anything I wrote here back when you first posted this page, to suggest that there was a single thing wrong with or bad about your find and suggestion.
One nice thing about Radio Sure is that if the URL of the stream can be determined (even including Baroque Around the Clock's stream, and others), then they can easily be added to the Radio Sure database (either on Radio Sure's web page so that everyone can enjoy it, or on a user-by-user basis by the user simply adding the station, through the Radio Sure interface, to the user's local database).
Of course, one can do that with Screamer Radio, too.
One way to obtain the ACTUAL URL of the station is to get it playing in something like Windows Media Player, and then look at the stream's properties.
NirSoft also makes some sniffer tools which, whenever playing a stream (through a browser player, for example), will show the stream's actual URL.
Once the actual stream (as opposed to the browser player's, and/or any of its advertising) is known, then it's fairly eay to create a new station listing in the databases of such as Radio Sure or Screamer Radio (or to correct ones which are already there for the station, but which have since gone dead in Radio Sure or Screamer because the station has changed things and only lets people listen in a browser-based "player" of some kind).
Anyway, I think the classical links and directories you've provided are excellent. Of course, you and I may be two of the old people left who routinely listen to it. [grin]
____________________________________
Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
Oops, I hadn't noticed that this ol'article had become a TechTreat.
I started 'updating' it to provide a bit more info on searching for classical music streams online... and then decided that aspect deserved an article to itself (I'll revert to the earlier draft for the sake of TechTreat subscribers).
Oldies? Or educationally fortunate? When I meet young students who are genuine lovers of literature and the visual arts but couldn't tell Mozart from a mousse, I feel that something quite uncanny has happened within western culture. So I offer no excuses for plugging good so-called 'classical music' stations online, however much that may make some cringe.
Bob
btw, What was up on the page? I really don't know - no problem anyway :)
When it comes to internet radio, it's pretty hard to beat the freeware RadioSure www.radiosure.com
They've got just about every radio station on the planet in their player/recorder, including all of those listed here.
Thank you for posting - I'll gladly look into this. At first glance, RadioSure seems to be a standalone internet radio freeware program. That's quite a different proposition from the online radio search engines discussed here which allow you to explore, select and access stations worldwide directly from your browser.
Yes, you're correct. RadioSure would be considered a competitor of SCREAMER RADIO (and other such Internet radio station clients), not another Internet radio station search engine.
The reason RadioSure might have been brought up is... well... firstly, because one just sees that sort of thing in places like this: In an anti-virus software thread, someone brings-up anti-spyware... that sort of thing. Close, but no cigar... if you know what I mean.
But another reason might have been because RadioSure groupies are all proud of the fact that it boasts so many stations in its database... a little over 12,00 (as of this writing), which is more than quadruple the number of stations in the SCREAMER database. And SCREAMER, one has to admit, has, for a long time, been widely considered "best of breed" among free Internet radio clients. It still out-classes RadioSure in terms of the granularity of some of its adjustments and settings.
One salient benefit of such a large database as one finds in RadioSure (and I think maybe the reason RadioSure got suggested here) is that it makes it so that one starts not really even needing web site guides to, or search engines for, Internet radio stations anymore. And, honestly, from my examination of it, that's darned near correct. What I mean is...
...yes, it's true that there are many more than the 12,000 or so (in the RadioSure database) Internet radio stations out there. However, from my cursory examination, there may very well not be very many more than 12,000 or so stations which will allow streams directly to radio clients like Screamer or RadioSure. Most other Internet radio stations are moving to the paradigm wherein one may only listen to the station's stream if one is on the station's web site, using the station's browser-based player which bears the station's advertising.
That's the tragic direction that Internet radio is taking. The cost of operating an Internet radio station -- at least lawfully (and that's really the operative word for my purposes, here) -- has become so prohibitive that stations are finding themselves forced to insert advertising in any way they can. Some stations aren't satisfied with the audible commercials which they insert into the stream itself. Such stations also want to force the listeners to view the advertising in their web-based players, too; and limit their streams so that they can only be played in such web-based players which are only on their own web sites... making it so that such as Screamer and/or RadioSure can't play such streams directly.
Said another (hopefully better) way: From my observation, there may actually not be very many more than 12,000 or so (I'm sure there are more, but I'm no longer convinced that there are that many more) stations which can be played using something like Screamer or RadioSure instead of solely via station's own advertising-laden web-page-based player.
So, then, if one isn't interested in any station which may only be listened to in the station's own web-page-based player; and if it's true that RadioSure has pretty much all the rest in its database, then it might be reasonable to wonder what would be the purpose of any RadioSure user needing a web site guide/directory or Internet radio station search engine... at all?
I'm not saying that that's how I necessarily see it...
...but that may very well be at least part of the reason why RadioSure was suggested here, even though station search engines and the like was really more the point, here.
Just a hunch, mind you.
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