ever since i found out about the
icecast directory back in may, internet radio broadcasts became my primary go-to for music. i used to think the radio format sucked ass, but now i see that was just because my only exposure to it had been through local FM stations after they had all been bought out by the same corporate entity and had their playlists trimmed down and homogenized; after trawling through the near-endless variety of stations on the internet i've become convinced it's among one of the best ways to discover and experience pre-recorded music.
some favorite stations of mine are
lounge-radio.com,
bay smooth jazz,
relaxed grooves nyc,
infrared.fm, and
netpd 1996. these are direct stream link btw so they might not work in-browser; throw the URLs into VLC or better yet download foobar2000 and make playlists of your favorite stations like i've been doing.
semi-related since the subject of equipment came up: i grabbed a usb soundbar since it was really the only speaker option i could make work in my cramped pc setup and it ended up working like a dream with my internet radio playlist: the remote just sends media key inputs over USB so i can navigate from station to station without having to actually walk over to my computer.
probably wasn't worth bringing up but i'm just really satisfied i was able to add another role to the list of many that my pc already serves, i love jack-of-all-trades computing when it's not in the form of some boring hyper-optimized portable rectangle.
