If you are like me and don't have XM or Sirus on your boat, here's a cheap (free) solution. Pandora and or Slacker for the iPhone. Pandora is a little more user specific. You can search for specific artists, songs etc... and create your own station based on these searches. They have OK stock stations but not great. You really need to customize and build your own station. Slacker has a little more of a slick interface that incorporates a coverflow like experience where you can swipe to the next song. Much better pre-programmed stations, very much like a XM experience. You can still search for specific songs or artists. I think both sound really good for streaming music, maybe Slacker sounds a little better, comparable to satalite radio. The free version of slacker only lets you skip 5 songs within an hour and has a 5 sec slacker commercial every 3 or 5 songs. The plus version has unlimited skips and no commercial for $3.99/month. Both seem to take a few seconds to buffer between songs. Once you get rolling, both can drop audio if you are on a busy wifi or a week edge network. 3G seems to work fine. I've heard the next system update will allow you to run more than one program at a time. So you can run say slacker and GPS or navigation software at the same time. If you have a jailbroken phone, you can do that now with an app called backgrounder.
well if you are buying the phone just to get free internet radio, then I have a bridge you might be interested in buying also. But if you ALREADY have the phone, then you can consider yourself privileged, smart, cutting edge, and have free internet radio along with all the other goodies.
Pandora seems to have a ringing like noise to it for me at least. My 3g phone has no probs keeping up with the music but can have a delay when only on edge network, just can't load fast enough. I'll have to try out Slacker to see if the audio quality is any better for me. SB
Yeah that's the codec they use to compress the audio. In the biz, they call that sound space monkeys.
I've not heard a compression codec that sounds good for any other these over-the-'net audio systems. The sirius codec is okay for the car and boat, but doubt it would be good on the home system. Some of these lossy digital compression schemes are worse that old fashioned FM radio. Some make even AM sound decent in comparison!
It's getting better every year. I think Slacker sounds pretty good, much better than internet radio was a year ago. I was just reading this morning about a Japanese company making a TV tuner for the iphone so you can watch live TV on it.
I listen to Yahoo Music and Comcast's MusicChoice on my pc. Quality is pretty good. Yahoo has sporadic "commercials," Comcast doesn't, but you must be a Comcast customer. Neither will generate a custom radio stations - you have to pick a genre you feel like listening to. I haven't listened to Sirius over the internet lately but when I was (about 3 years ago), the "space monkey" effect was REALLY bad.
I have been listening to Slacker on the boat via the iPhone and so far its been great. I also got a Soundport to charge and take a line out for listening in my car and that works great too. Slacker allows to set a no expletives filter which is great. I am starting to not like that my Sirius/XM stations are now going unfiltered which I don't really care for and have no choice in turning that off like in Slacker..
ConcertVault is good. Recorded concerts, like the old bootleg tapes. For the iPhone and computer. Some of my cars have the headphone jack input. On the boat I use a $10 cassette tape adaptor. Works well enough.
