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[br1dge]

Anyone know of a good index? ALl I have found want to launch you into their BS player and throw pop-ups at you - all I want is the url so JRM can play them... Please help - Thanks - jeff

[jgreen]

At lalittle's suggestion, I went to www.shoutcast.com.  There are about 500 links there which you can drag into playing now and create a playlist on the tree.  MC10 had its own link aggregator, I'm not sure where that went in MC11.

[lalittle]

At lalittle's suggestion, I went to www.shoutcast.com.  There are about 500 links there which you can drag into playing now and create a playlist on the tree.

I agree;)  In my searching, I found that shoutcast seemed to have the most up to date list of stations that will work with MC.  Other sites with multiple stations either required their own proprietary player, had too many ads, or required some sort of hack to get them to work with MC.  The Shoutcast links seem to be just simple links to streaming stations, and the list seems to be kept current and have the fewest dead links in it.

For a while I was adding the stations to my MC library.  I found that for organizational purposes, the following tag structure worked best for me:  I tagged them with the Genre "Web Radio."  I then used the "Artist" tag for the music style and the "Album" tag for the actual Radio Station name.  Using the tags in this manner may seem odd at first glance, but it makes sense when you're using it, and after trying several different organizational approaches, this was the most intuitive.  You select "Web Radio" in the Genre collumn, which limits the selection to all your Web Radio stations.  The Artist field is then used to select the type of music you want to list to, and the Album collumn selects the actual station.  The "Song name" tag will change depending on the broadcast.  Using this structure, the three main MC collumns are used to organize and subdivide the radio stations in a way that makes sense and is easy to use.

Larry

[jgreen]

Slight disagreement here.  "Album" for radio station name, yes.  But "Genre" is too important a search field to mess with.  Since web radio is so narrow, individual stations can be accurately classified by genre.  I use a custom field to identify it as web radio.

[lalittle]

Slight disagreement here.  "Album" for radio station name, yes.  But "Genre" is too important a search field to mess with.  Since web radio is so narrow, individual stations can be accurately classified by genre.  I use a custom field to identify it as web radio.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the Genre field being "too important to mess with."  Using the "Genre" field to define music as "Web Radio" works really well (for me) in practice since you have three available columns (Genre, Artist, and Album) and you typically need three levels of classification for Web Radio stations, which are used to 1) group all Web Radio stations together, 2) separate the stations by music type, and 3) list all stations individually.  Three levels of classifation are simply fit into the three existing columns.  I don't like adding extra fields/columns unless it's actually necessary (I like to keep the interface as simple as possible), and since the existing interface provides the necessary number of columns, it's easier (in my opinion) to just utilize the existing ones.

First, you classify stations as Web Radio for the "top" level, which uses the "Genre" column.  This works well since listenning to the "Radio" is a distinctly different activity from listenning to albums that exsit on the system.  This is similar to the way MC currently works with it's "Web Media" -- i.e. Web Media is a completely separate class of music that gets it's own branch of the tree.

Once you've selected "Web Radio," the next level of classifaction that you'd typically want would be the genre, which is why the "Artist" field is used for this (it's the next sub-category in the view.)  Lastly, you classify by actual station, which is as far as you need to classify.  In other words, you have 3 collumns to work with -- the first ("Genre") is used to separate Web Radio from all other media, the second ("Artist") is used for seperating the Radio Stations into genres, and the third collumn ("Album") is used to separate and select the actual stations.

I tried other scenarios, but this one works the best for us by far.

Note that I eventually grew tired of keeping my Web Radio stations up to date as many of them went off the air, so I now tend to just use the Shoutcast page to directly play the stations.  I don't get to have a list of "favorite stations" when doing this since I just get the entire shoutcast list, but I don't have to worry about some of my station links going dead on me either -- if they go off the air, they'll be taken off the shoutcast list.

Larry

[jgreen]

"Genre" has to do with what the music sounds like, not where it comes from.  We attach "Genre" to tracks based on what they sound like.  Web radio, each station being so narrow in its playlist, lends itself perfectly to classification by genre.  That way, if you're in a hurry  and looking for "dance" songs, one of your choices would be a web stream classified as "dance", along with all the other whatnot.  If you have 100 web radio stations, what is going to help you choose the type of music, if "web radio" is listed on each genre field?

In the old days, "A.M." was a genre.  I suggest we've come a long way since then, and thank God. 

[lalittle]

"Genre" has to do with what the music sounds like, not where it comes from.

The advantage of using the Genre field as I suggest is because it allows you to subclassify the radio stations over the three EXISTING columns, which is the number of columns needed to do this logically.  This way I can categorize web radio stations WITHOUT having to make new fields/columns/views.

That way, if you're in a hurry  and looking for "dance" songs, one of your choices would be a web stream classified as "dance", along with all the other whatnot.  If you have 100 web radio stations, what is going to help you choose the type of music, if "web radio" is listed on each genre field?

It isn't a problem because the "Artist" field is used to classify the stations into genres.  I know it doesn't fit the precise model of of the category titles, but I like to separate my web radio stations from my other media at the top level, which happens to be the "Genre" field.  I could add a field and utilize a special view, but it's so much easier to just use the existing fields in a slightly different manner.  I was actually reluctant to try this at first and I kept "fighting" to use the genre field to classify the "type" of station, but in the end it just wasn't as conducive to the way I listen to music.

Larry

[jgreen]

Custom fields may look like a slippery slope, and in some ways it is, but it's worth it in the end.  I'll admit I made up a few really stupid custom fields when I first started doing it, but I've calmed down somewhat since then and don't do more than 5 or 10 new custom fields per day.

FWIW, I'm still using the "mood" field to designate odd items like whether the track contains vocals or not, so I understand the impetus to hijack current fields.