Lately I’ve been listening to Soma FM a lot. I especially like their Groove Salad channel. They play Boards of Canada all the time, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Anyway, their 128k MP3 stream has pretty decent quality – I guess it’s technically the same as a DAB radio station – and it plays on just about anything. Winamp on my PC, with its Delta 1010 hooked up to the stereo, no problem. Linosaur, my Linux server, was a little trickier, but once I figured out the stream URL, I pasted it into phpMP and saved it as a playlist, and off it went. I have a LCD and keypad hooked up to linosaur using LCDproc and a modified version of lcd-stuff, and I can play stuff from that.
Perhaps the coolest thing is that it plays on my Pocket PC (an old Ipaq hx4700) using GSPlayer. When you visit Soma FM’s page, it downloads a Winamp playlist onto your machine to start playback. That contains several streams, I guess as backup if some of them are down. I just got this groovesalad.pls file and copied it onto my PDA’s memory card. (I prefer to keep stuff on a card, since my hx4700 crashes and wipes its RAM with monotonous regularity.) When I run GSPlayer (which I also keep on the card to save reinstalling every 2 weeks) the playlist can be opened and the fat beats begin.
So, if I do this, and dangle my DSL modem/router out of the window, I can listen in the back yard while washing my bike. I’m off to do that now 🙂