Monday 10/10/05
I've recently been enjoying AOL Radio at work and here at home on the Windows box and the new laptop (they have a browser-based player that works only in Windows). It's kind of sucky if you don't have an AOL account, since there are a limited number of stations and the streams are low-quality mono, but if you do have an AOL screen name, you get pretty darn nice sound quality and a wide selection of stations, including an "all covers" station, one that only plays Yes songs (there are equivalent stations for three dozen other artists), plus a bunch of XM Satellite Radio stations. Not all of them -- for that you need XM's $7.99 a month package or an actual XM receiver to get their full station lineup over the Internet -- but you do get more than 60. XM's boasted "150 channels" includes traffic, news, sports, and talk channels, though, many of them local -- it looks like you get most if not all of the XM music channels -- the good stuff, in other words.
You can get an AOL account for as little as $9.95 a month. (You may not see this offered, but it's the plan I have. Call 'em up and ask for it. Actually, they may have even less expensive plans -- they used to have one that was $4.95.) AOL of course comes with seven screen names, and each of these can listen to AOL Radio. Which means you can share your account with up to six friends, and for less than $1.50 a month each of you gets unlimited access to AOL Radio -- plus of course the rest of AOL (over your existing Internet connection) if you want it. But it's a great deal just for the radio when you split it up like that.
Much to my shock, they released a Mac client for AOL Radio this past weekend. It had a bit of difficulty downloading the station list at first, presumably due to overloaded servers, but I finally got it going Sunday morning. And much to my further shock, it actually integrates with iChat to display the current track in your status message, offers a floating translucent notification of title and artist when a new song comes on, and -- get this -- it's AppleScriptable. It took me about 60 seconds to adapt my script that pauses iTunes when my screen blanker kicks in to support AOL Radio as well.
AOL Radio appears to be using Coding Technologies' AACplus codec. AOL owns Winamp, which plays AACplus streams; I'll bet the Mac AOL Radio codec is derived from that. I'd love to see iTunes and the iPod support AACplus -- you can get quite impressive quality from just a 48 Kbps stream. It appears AOL Radio is using 80 Kbps streams, however.
aspcomments2 by Jerry Kindall
based on aspcomments by sneaker