Bill Machrone

Streaming radio is a mess. It holds the promise of delivering unique sounds and voices from all over the world to your desktop—the perfect antidote to Clear Channel's homogenization of American musical tastes. But the nascent industry is fettered by goofy legislation, incomprehensible royalty fees orchestrated by the music industry and enforced by the Library of Congress, inconstant advertisers, intrusive streaming technologies, and poor sound quality.

Standards are a problem, too. Stations choose different bit rates at which to broadcast their signals. Bandwidth costs money, so they are generally motivated to broadcast at the lowest possible bit rate. Various streaming encoders give stations considerable latitude in compression, and the stations differ dramatically in the amount of energy they expend on encoding their program material for the best quality within bandwidth limitations. It's not unusual to hear a 20-Kbps RealAudio stream that sounds better than a 44-Kbps stream.

Stations also give you various levels of control over content. For instance, jazz station WBGO runs its RealAudio player in a child window, giving you no access to information about the stream. Another jazz station, KCSM, launches the full RealOne player, which shows you bit rates, lost packets, and other nerdy information that might help you improve your listening experience or diagnose problems. WBGO broadcasts at 44 Kbps, while KCSM offers 20-, 32-, and 64-Kbps RealAudio streams. KCSM's lowest bit rate sounds better than WBGO's single bit rate. KCSM transmits its 20-Kbps stream in 90-Kbps bursts, so the line is dormant roughly 80 percent of the time. The faster streams are continuous.

Not only does KCSM broadcast at different bit rates but it also broadcasts in different formats. You can listen to the same program material in RealAudio, Windows Media, or MP3 format. Assuming that KCSM expends the same amount of effort in encoding each format, you can hear significant differences in playback quality and tone.

RealAudio's lower bit rates often sound as if they were recorded in a huge steel drum, with a hollow, boomy quality. Windows Media is bass-heavy, which is ideal if you like a funky groove. MP3 sounds the most neutral to me, but each player has a unique sound, too. A given MP3 sample will sound somewhat different when played on MusicMatch, RealOne, Windows Media Player, or Winamp. The differences are subtle but noticeable.

You can access Internet radio in many different ways, and if you're a musical adventurer, you'd be wise not to become set in your habits. Each search engine and each player has its own view of the Internet radio universe. The RealOne engine rates its stations for reliability and quality; unfortunately, there seems to be an inverse relationship between them. Meanwhile, Windows Media Player gives you access, for example, to the witty and sharply defined AccuRadio Web-only stations, and MusicMatch and Winamp have unique views of the MP3 world. I give the nod to MusicMatch, however, for better, deeper searches by genre or artist.

Internet radio is far from a finished product. You have to be tolerant of software glitches. A paused or stopped player will often fail to resume; you generally have to close it and restart it from the radio station's page. Also, a given streaming server has a limit on how many streams it can serve. Remember, this is not true broadcasting. The packets that arrive at your machine are not shared by any other listener. You will occasionally encounter "server full" error messages, meaning that all of the available streams are in use. This is usually a transient problem, however, as other listeners drop off or change stations.

Web radio isn't for dial-up users. But if your cable or DSL hookup is flaky, it can be torture. Dropped and out-of-order packets can cause heavily degraded audio quality and a menagerie of weird noises.

At least Internet radio stations have a reprieve from the record companies' usual shortsighted thuggery. Eleventh-hour legislation last year saved the vast majority of small Internet broadcasters from extinction. The stations' crimes: promoting music, linking to music sales sites, and getting people interested in something other than the record companies' darlings du jour.

If you've got a fast, robust connection, give Internet radio a listen. Ultimately, it's worth the effort.

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