Our Daily Beard – 24/02/13

Wotcha.

It’s Sunday, the day of rest. Take a load off your feet.

Not that much! Ouch, put a plaster on that.

Right, all better.

You know what’s a good thing?

Web radio. It has become my latest go-to entertainment, so I thought I’d share that and do a little plugging.

There’s a little desktop app I’ve been using called Radio Player. Does what it says on the tin. A lot of established radio stations use it already as a vehicle for their web service, so most web radio stations are compatible with it.

If you’re at all like me you like all your stations in one place, rather than going from one site to another. You can attach feeds to windows media player and other players, but I find them a little clunky. Radio Player is a tiny install that I just sit on the taskbar- click and it opens the last station you listened to. It also displays any visual media that the station provides (okay, largely adverts, but also weather info, buttons for quickly swapping sub-stations and so links).

You can find it at this link, disguised as a sentence.

So what stations keep me entertained of late? Heart is okay for dipping one’s toe as they sometimes let you know what the current song is before you go onto the station. Local radio… well, yeah. BBC Stoke is alright! When you’re sick of chart music, i.e. 90% of the time, there’s the usual rock stations like Kerrang. To be honest, I can’t listen to them for long either, because they lean so heavily towards whiney Americana. For me, my current favourite has to be Absolute Radio.

Absolute has not just a main station but 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and classic rock sub-stations. You can switch with one click, hopping between music every time something comes on that you don’t like. I tend to hover in the 70s, 80s and 90s, while the main station itself is a nice mixture of new and old and not just chart music.

On top of that, they have great presenters like Christian O’Connell and Frank Skinner (on Saturday mornings- reaallly funny!). Check out Annabel Port around 5pm on Geoff Lloyd’s home time show- she’s witty and mean, my favourite combination. They even podcast these shows if you miss them- I’ve had about 40 hours of entertainment from Frank’s back catalogue. If by the grace of the gods you should see this Frank- hello Mr. Radio!

So yeah, check those out, you wretches.

See you tomorrow!

 
[sociable]