Internet Radio

Internet radio is not a new concept and like most of us I knew it existed, but never thought of it seriously until a few days back when I noticed a friend of mine listening to it (yes, Dipti you get honourable mention here! :)) It's a really cool alternative to putting songs from your disk in a playlist and then changing that many times over to get rid of the boredom! Obviously we listen to the 'normal' radio stations for this reason and also the fact that you frequently get to listen to newer and more importantly random songs!

I'm not quite certain how many guys actually listen to online radio - specially desi friends abroad. The coolest part is if you have a data plan on your cell phone you can listen to online radio on the go too! One of my favourite station is Radio NRI. To listen online from your computer simply follow the link below -

http://www.radionri.com/

Once on the site, click the 'listen now' button on the top right part of the page - it asks you to download a m3u file on your disk - now play this file from any music player (almost all should support this format). m3u is basically a playlist file and this particular one simply has a single entry to an online stream. You can also google for the station and go to some site which has a player embedded to listen straight from there but I personally prefer this way 'coz I don't have to open a page every time, the file is always sitting in my media player.

To play from a cell phone you need to find your player which supports 'live stream' - in the phone I have (Nokia 5230) the default 'media player' doesn't have this feature but the included 'Real Player' supports streaming audio/video.

Most phones will have this player or you can install it pretty easily (google is your friend!). Now in the player there will be an option of 'new link' under 'streaming links'. In the 'new link' option you will have the option of saving the link in the phone / memory card. Choose one and then in the field where it asks for a web address (where mostly you'll see the first part automatically entered as 'rtsp://') enter the following address exactly as it is -

rtsp://qtss.streamguys.com:554/radionri.sdp

This station is pretty good and you can always find tonnes of other stations (yes, including Radio Mirchi etc) in the same way - the only small problem with listening to Mirchi this way is that if you're in a totally opposite timezone you'll have to listen to really crazy old and in general crazy songs since it's bang in the middle of the night in India when it's day time at your place!