Twelve Black Code Monkeys

For those who need yet more motivation to check out podcasting, here’s a site that Tod Maffin has put together that consolidates a list of podcasts of traditional radio shows. (note - the site is no longer available) (via Amanita.net)

When podcasting started, it was mainly with the idea of giving a voice to anyone who had a microphone and wanted to record their words and upload it to a server - kind of an audio version of blogging. And it still works this way. The vast majority of podcasts out there are by individuals who may not have any broadcasting experience, professional equipment, etc. Likewise, there is no regulation of podcasts like there is of traditional radio, no financial structure unless a podcaster has been able to secure some advertising support, and no real pressure to post a show at any given time, except perhaps from clamoring fans egging you on, if you’re lucky.

But what began as a kind of pirate radio movement, has become much more than that because traditional broadcasters recognized that people liked the power of not having to be chained to a stations schedule but rather have a Tivo-like timeshifting ability. Likewise the idea that no government or corporate entity was going to come and tell them what they could and couldn’t listen to because it might hurt some segment of the audience.

It appears that more and more traditional radio are getting the message and are offering their content online as podcasts. This list that Tod has put together shows just that. I think public broadcasting is probably much more insulated, due to the fact that they don’t have to prove audience numbers to some advertiser and can just rely on the donations of members. Public Radio has been at the forefront of providing this new format, although they are still providing only a tiny fraction of their programming this way.

It will be interesting to see how this trend plays out especially as the commercial stations try to figure out how to switch to this format but continue to make money. Certainly I think the hyper-commercial radio that has commercials take up one third to half of their programming are going to die, because now that the growing number of podcast listeners has thousands of choices (which will only grow even more in number), why would you choose to listen to a station or podcast for that matter which has more than one or two 30-second commercials every half hour?

By the way, Todd’s list isn’t just of public radio, even though that’s the title. It does include a section for “Commercial Radio” and other shows or whole sections are not public – E.G. Leo Laporte on KFI, or Air America Network shows.

Back to Content ConsumptionI’ve been struggling recently with keeping up with audio content. In general I prefer audio to text because, as I mentioned, I’m a slow reader and I can listen when I otherwise wouldn’t be able to read – such as exercising, driving, cooking, doing housework, etc. I can also speed up much of what I listen to via a feature on my Ipod. I can divide my listening into two main categories – talk and music. Within Music, I can listen to my collection of CD’s I’ve burned to MP3, or I can listen to a much larger collection of tracks from my Launchcast internet radio account. Within talk, I listen to podcasts, to audio books, and to traditional radio shows, primarily NPR. The biggest technical problem is that there are too many different formats which may or may not work on a single device or program. My burned music is in MP3, Launchcast streams Windows Media, and my Audio books are in a proprietary format that Audible.com uses. While podcasts are usually initially in MP3’s, I convert them to AAC in order to take advantage of the ability to have them play at faster speeds on my iPod.

All these different formats cause headaches, but are not insurmountable, at least on a computer. iTunes will play most of these, although it won’t do the Launchcast radio and I can’t install it at work. If I want portability, I can play MP3’s and Audio Books on my Treo 650, but no AAC files nor streaming Windows Media or Realmedia which would allow me to listen to Launchcast and NPR segments of my choosing – which I’ll elaborate a bit on below.

When it comes to NPR, or any radio show for that matter, there are ways of making it more portable than you initially would think, but it is not elegant or easy. I can listen to NPR shows on my Treo, but they are just streams from live broadcasts, not specific selections that I make from the archives. So what? Well, for one, why even bother with a Treo and just use a radio? Exactly my point! A radio is for live broadcasts, but the whole power behind digital devices like the Treo, the TiVo, the iPod, etc., is that they enable you to have a much greater say in the matter of when and how you watch or listen to something.

I did find a program for my PC that allows me to “timeshift” radio like a TiVo does TV and used it for a while to record numerous NPR shows which I then synced with my iPod. This software, called Replay Radio, does really seem to be useful, but it just wasn’t fleshed out enough for me. Maybe part of this had to do with the fact that I was telling it to record 9 hours of content a day! Ok, so maybe I was overdoing it a bit. But still, all this writing files to the hard drive and then optionally converting them to AAC was making my computer sluggish as well as taking up lots of storage space. Sure I could have archived some of this to CD or DVD, but that means yet more time spent managing files! Speaking of which, just managing the process could take a while. It’s not nearly as easy as recording and managing shows on TiVo. While there are a few hundred channels on TV, there are thousands upon thousands of potential radio stations, so actually compiling an accurate programming list of even a fraction of these is a monumental task! Still, if you need to timeshift radio programming, this is definitely a way to do it, just realize that depending on how much you record, the process of keeping everything straight (not to mention actually listening to the stuff!), may take up a considerable amout of time.

Not long ago, I discovered that at least some of the shows I was listening to from NPR have RSS feeds. The feeds present each report within a show like Morning Edition as a separate entry in the feed, so that you don’t have to listen to the entire program to find what you are interested in. You simply pick the ones in your newsreader that are of interest, and link to a page on NPR’s site which has a button to listen to a streaming version of just that segment. I can’t do this when I’m away from a computer as my Treo cannot download these streams or play these streams, but at least it cuts way down on the amount of time that I would have had to spend listening because… I can filter! Ideally I would like to see a way to listen to these on my Treo and/or the iPod, but this would either entail NPR producing streaming MP3’s in addition to the other formats, or to provide actual files to download ala podcasting (they do this already for On The Media, Future Tense, and Morning Stories, but that’s it), neither of which I think they will be doing any time soon. But hey, you never know!

Speaking of podcasting, there isn’t much of an issue here. I can transfer podcasts at home onto my iPod (or theoretically by Treo) and listen to them anywhere. If I haven’t been able to do this for a while, I can still listen to them by just downloading and playing them on any computer connected to the internet, or even theoretically doing this with my Treo, although personally I haven’t tried yet because the GPRS download speeds I can currently via T-Mobile are too slow.

The other main issue that I was grappling with recently was how to make all this audio accessible to me at home without a) having to be right next to the computer, or b) having constantly be walking around with headphones on. I’d seen these streaming media servers at some computer stores that intrigued me. These allow you to transmit audio files on your computer, or even internet radio to this device that you hook to the audio input jacks of your stereo. The communication between the device and your computer is via Wifi. Voila, you have an instant serious listening station to play your music and/or spoken word audio no matter where your computer is in the house related to your stereo.

So I went out and bought the SMC EZ-Stream Wireless Audio Adapter (SMCWAA-B). I was unable to determine prior to buying it whether it would play Launchcast radio, but I thought I’d give it a shot. The description on the box says that it’s compatible with Rhapsody, but I don’t use that. So, I bought it, brought it home and started struggling first with simply connecting it to my wifi network. I use WEP security to encrypt my network, and the user interface on the device was not very straightforward, so all this took a while to get working. The software that comes with the unit makes you install Musicmatch Jukebox in order to play MP3’s or WMA’s. Despite doing this, the unit couldn’t find some sample tracks I added to the Musicmatch library. Luckily, I found that one can download third-party server software, most notably TwonkyVision, which can greatly expland the initial capabilities of the software your device comes with. Initially TwonkyVision didn’t work either, so I had the idea to turn off my TiVo Home Networking Option, and all of a sudden success! Perhaps this was my problem with the original software not working as well. More importantly, though, TwonkyVision gave me access to my preferred audio software on my PC: iTunes. It was able to use my iTunes library to create basically a mirror of the same hierarchical menus that are on my iPod to navigate through tracks based on album, artist, genre, etc.. The only problem was that it would still only play MP3’s and WMA’s. No AAC’s, and no Audible files. Researching this further I found that the only media server that can currently play AAC’s is Airport Express with AirTunes. This would have been the perfect solution for me, except that of course this doesn’t play Launchcast radio! Argh!

And there’s the rub. It seems like no streaming media server out there is perfect in that it will let you stream any type of file or internet stream to your stereo. Certainly I don’t understand the intricate technical details in back of these technologies, but to me it seemed a fairly obvious product would be one that simply took the analog output of your computer’s sound card, converted it to digital bits, transmitted over a wifi connection to a device that could decode this into analog again to be output to the stereo. The media servers that exist allow for actual browsing through your music collection with a remote control and a visual textual display. This of course requires the device understand file types, directory structures, etc. What about simply a type of audio “modem,” if you will, that converts an analog stream into digital and then back into analog? It wouldn’t have the interactive ability to control things through the stereo – you would have to do that controlling on the PC side - but as far as I’m concerned, that’s icing.

I posited this question to the TwonkyVision forums over media-server.com as they seemed to have a lot of knowledgeable users and the main relevant suggestion I got was for a product that’s pretty different, but one that I decided to try out anyway.

The Radio Shack 2.4GHz Audio/Video Signal Sender/Receiver is something that looks like it was designed to share the signal coming from a dvd player, CD player, VCR, satellite receiver, etc., among stereos and/or TV’s in different rooms in a house. Its 2.4 GHz range seems to indicate some Wifi compatibility, but really it has nothing to do with Wifi, which is completely digital. Instead it is just an FM modulation transmitter/receiver that works on the same frequency as Wifi signals. You can only do so much research on the web, although it really depends on the device and who sells it. Radio Shack does not offer a way to review products on their site. The cost of it was low enough ($100) that I could just go buy it myself and if it didn’t meet my requirements, I could return it. So that’s what I did. Here are my impressions so far:

The device is actually two devices, a sender part and a receiver part. Both of these not only have to be plugged into a power outlet, but also have to be plugged into your computer and/or stereo. So what is in one way a “wireless” solution becomes one which also adds a lot more wires! The instructions are pretty sparse, as you can see (Radio Shack no longer has the manual available online), but there’s really not a whole lot to these things. You can operate them on four different “channels” and they not only have RCA stereo audio jacks, but also an RCA and coax video jack. I suppose with the video I could transmit stuff from my PC monitor if I had a video out on it. Alas, it is a non-multimedia laptop, so no such video out is available.

I was initially concerned that there would be interference between these and the Wifi I have in my house, but that seems to not be an issue. Whether this has to do with the different channels, I don’t know, but I just used the default channels for the device and there’s no interference like when I used to have a portable phone that worked on the 2.4 GHz frequency that would always toss all the computers off the network whenever we used it!

While there was no interference from Wifi, there was a lot of interference from other radio frequency sources. For example any time my cell phone rang, there was tons of crackling and other distortion, although of course the degree depended on how close the phone was to the transmitter or receiver. When the microwave was on there was some as well. As far as sound quality is concerned, it’s not bad, but with FM-Modulation, you are only getting FM-quality sound. This probably will not matter when it comes to spoken word, but for music, you can definitely tell the difference. The dynamic range is truncated so that you aren’t hearing the sounds that are on the extreme ends of bass and treble. Probably mostly bass because when I play music through these it sounds a bit tinny. I have to really play with equalization, but I know that even when I set loudness on and add additional bass and/or treble, that I’m simply stretching the information, not adding back in sound that’s been chopped off due to the smaller dynamic range. And I’m not an audiophile by any means. I can only imagine how horrible FM sounds to all those with more sensitive ears than mine!

Still, having a set of these sender/receivers is still the main option that fits at this point. I suppose if I got over my love of Launchcast, I could move on to the Airport Express, but as I’ve explained in the past, there is something inherently great about Launchcast that I so far have not found on any other internet radio platform – the ability for it to learn exactly what you like based on your own ratings and those of people who rate music similar to you – a kind of big social network based on music ratings that allows you to keep hearing new music that fits your taste even though you may have never known such music existed!

Another usage that the Radio Shack units allow for that I would not be able to get with a media server is something like Atmosphere, a background sound generator which I’ve talked about before which I really like. Of course I could record Atmosphere to an MP3 file and just play that over and over, but that would do away with some of the inherent randomness that Atmosphere has built into it.

As you can see, there are lots of options out there for those who want to listen to music and spoken word audio, and for many people one of those options will provide everything they want or need. Being somewhat picky about this stuff, of course, hurts the chances of this happening. We’re obviously still in the infancy of digital music when it comes to distribution mechanisms, portability, and compatibility. It may not seem like that with the iPod being around for close to five years and Internet Radio close to ten, but eventually there will need to be some consolidation in terms of formats and technologies or else many of us will have to continue to trudge along with multiple devices, multiple programs, tweaks and workarounds in order to enable us to play everything we want in every way we want, and any place we want.

Update: I’ve recently learned that Launchcast IS partnering with an equipment manufacturer to stream their content to stereos wirelessly. Philips Stremium brand devices apparently will do this. They are, however, very pricey compared to other media servers and I’m not quite sure why. The other problem is that currently Launchcast support is only for its genre stations and not for a user’s custom station. This really defeats the whole purpose. Apparently there are plans to get the custom station support working but I could not get any kind of timeline out of Launchcast folks. Without this support, I can’t see considering such a device, and even with this support I’m hard-pressed to spend such a huge premium just to get somewhat better quality over my current solutions. Of course these devices let you stream video as well, so if you have lots of digital video that you download off the net or create with your camcorder, this will allow you to transmit this stuff to your TV, but then you can do this with devices that cost a fraction of the price…

I’ve been playing with this program Replay Radio which allows me to audio streams that are playing through my computer. There are a bunch of programs that do similar things. I’m going to be posting a larger piece about this soon enough, but for now I thought I’d talk a little about NPR and how the new technologies are affecting them and will continue to in the future.

NPR is a great source of news, at least as far as I’m concerned. I know some people find it too liberal, too snobby, or whatever, but I think there’s some quality reporting and as long as you keep an ears open for bias, which exists to some extent in all reporting no matter the source (based on the questions that are asked or what is decided as relevant to a given piece), you can glean a lot from the various programming on NPR.

NPR is a special case when it comes to broadcasting of course because it does not get its revenue from advertising, the way all other radio does. It gets its money from a combination of the taxpayer through government funding and through voluntary means. It’s a bit contradictory in that sense because on the one hand you have people who are giving to NPR whether they want to or not simply by their paying taxes, and another group who not only gives through their taxes but gives again through voluntary donations.

NPR then will also charge people again if they want to obtain tapes or transcripts of recordings, or if they want to download digital versions (through Audible.com). I can understand that tapes and the writing of transcripts may mean using extra resources. Even making digital recordings can do this as well. However, one can also listen to various NPR programs via streaming audio for absolutely nothing. True, they are often in somewhat lower-quality audio (I see often 20kbps, or slightly less than what AM radio is rated at), and it is less convenient than a downloadable file, but it’s still a disparity. Then if you consider these new computer applications like Replay Radio that take that stream and convert it into a downloadable file, the disparity becomes even more of an issue.

Podcasting, of course, has made this issue all the more relevant as home-grown (and a few more professional) broadcasters have started putting out audio files that are downloaded. NPR itself is experimenting with this with podcasts of On The Media. On The Media, of course, is ahead of the curve a bit because its raison d’etre is thinking about media, media trends, new technologies, etc. I wonder if NPR is thinking about these various delivery mechanisms and how they make sense?

When Satellite Radio came on the scene a few years ago I was excited about being able to get an all-NPR channel or channels and have access to it no matter where I was roaming. But after talking to someone at XM (Sirius does carry a couple of NPR shows, but none of the bread and butter stuff), I was told that NPR didn’t want to use them because it might deplete revenue of affiliate stations.

This is where things get a little more complicated. NPR isn’t just one monolithic entity, but rather it’s a public broadcasting network and in an of itself does not do any broadcasting except over the Internet, and even with that has only been doing it for a few years. Traditionally, it’s relied on affiliate stations that pay for its content. Some of these stations actually create content themselves which is then syndicated on other affiliates, although I have no idea how this works in terms of revenue – does NPR play the middle man? Do these stations talk directly to themselves and work out compensation plans? In any case, as you can see, it’s not a simple and clear situation. Affiliates need to be able to pay for these programs, for the general NPR programs, for their facilities, for staff, etc. This is what voluntary funds are for. I wonder, though, whether any of those donations go to NPR itself and if so how much? What about government funding? Does that go solely to NPR proper or to any of the affiliates?

In any case, the issue again comes down to content and paying for that content without resorting to advertising. Certainly advertising could be resorted to, but this is what makes NPR listenable in many ways – you aren’t bombarded by ridiculous amounts of offensive ads every time you want to hear the news or some interesting stories. And anyone who listens to NPR will tell you how annoying pledge drives can get.

So, the question basically is how does NPR and all the affiliate stations make money? One answer is more government funding, but there are a lot of people who would balk at this either because they think NPR is biased and biased in a way that contradicts their own political leanings. Alternately some believe simply that people should not be forced to pay for this if they don’t listen to it. These are certainly understandable arguments, so then what’s next? Perhaps NPR really needs to be thinking about setting up a subscription-based service for “premium” listeners or members. So, basically, you would become a member through your local affiliate the way you do now, and that affiliate would get a cut of your donation, but you could apply directly to NPR as well. Instead of getting a tote bag, an umbrella, a coffee mug, or a CD, you would simply get a membership to download content from NPR or any of its affiliates. You could have graduated levels of membership that would give you access to a greater number of these files. They could package the various shows produced by affiliates, charge differently based on the sound quality (and thus file size) of the content, etc.

As a fan of NPR, and member of local affiliates, even I have difficulty sometimes justifying the fact that I’m paying extra for something that I’m already paying for via taxes. I understand why this is, but it’s still doesn’t always sit well with me. Then the fact that I can’t get the content the way I want (via a downloadable file) unless I pay yet more money, and it’s a bit frustrating. However, I’ve paid subscription fees to various other providers of content (Satellite Radio and TV, Internet Radio, etc.) and not felt it to be onerous. Subscription, I feel, is the most fair because it is opt-in. If NPR continues to receive public funding, that’s fine by me, and so taxpayers should still get access to the programming in some form, but let those who are willing to pay extra receive the content exactly the way they want. That means being able to download this content as individual files, but perhaps also as premium channels on both Satellite Radio providers. That’s my idea, anyway. Then again, as it should be clear from this entry, I’m not an expert on the internal revenue workings within NPR and its affiliates, so take this for what its worth, but I think that as radio of all kinds make a transition from the current AM/FM model of local affiliates to a more global internet-based or satellite-based model, that NPR will have to adapt just as many other traditional broadcasters will if they don’t want to be made irrelevant by the scores of independent broadcasters coming out of the woodwork that provide their content for small fees (or absolutely nothing) via podcasts or audio streaming.

I haven’t devoted a whole entry to podcasting yet, only referring to it here and there, so I thought I’d do something a little more detailed. For many this will be old news. Podcasting has gotten a lot of mainstream media attention lately even though it’s only been in existence for 6 months, perhaps a bit less. For those who are tech and internet-savvy, if you’re not listening to podcasts yet, then you have probably known about it for a while now.

What is podcasting? Basically, it is a method for downloading various audio files to your computer in an automated way. More specifically, it is kind of a combination of internet radio and blogging. Adam Curry, former MTV VJ and creator of MTV.com before corporate entities like MTV had a clue about the web, created podcasting with the help of some programmers.

To get more detailed, we have to explain a bit about blogs and RSS. Part of the success of blogs in my and many others opinion has a lot to do with a technology that is intimately related to blogging called RSS or Real Simple Syndication. Blogging services and software create RSS files that include the actual content from your blog as well as meta data like when it was written, what category it fits into and so forth. News aggregators check this file either on a scheduled basis or by the blogger “pushing” it to the aggregator. Users employ applications (news readers) which can subscribe to “feeds” via the aggregators. Feeds are basically these RSS files that contain the content from X number of posts by the blogger. Because of the meta data and the intelligence of the news reader software, one can keep up to date, delete old posts, or keep certain posts for future reference, much like you could clip articles or hold onto specific issues of a favorite magazine.

So far, all of this stuff is relating to written text. What Curry wanted to do is to extend this to audio recordings since he had been doing his own internet radio show for a while. And in fact there was no reason that this couldn’t work because RSS has the ability to include file attachments. But news readers didn’t have the ability to really keep track of these recordings, download them, etc. So Curry built iPodder, the first such program. This allowed users to subscribe to specific feeds that contained audio content, and to have these downloaded to a specific directory so that they could be easily listened to on the computer or transferred to a portable device.

As I’m sure you know, the Apple iPod is the most popular digital music (mp3-player) device out there, and so the term “podcast” stuck, however, you can get podcasting applications that work with Windows Media Player and many other MP3 players and even smartphones like the Treo 650.

In addition to iPodder, the main application that I use these days, both because it seems to be well-built, but also because it seems to have the fastest development cycles which result in the most features, is Doppler Radio. The most recent release, version 2.0, has a couple of new features which seem particularly useful for me as an iPod user. One is additional management of podcasts on your iPod. Previously you would have to manually go through and delete old podcasts, but now you can specify a method by which Doppler will decided to remove older ones. The other nice feature added is that Doppler can now convert any audio file, be in an MP3, a WMA, or something else, into Apple’s proprietary m4b file type that allows for “bookmarking.” Normally MP3’s don’t have any bookmarking capability because they were originally meant primarily for music, which is usually only 2-10 minutes long, and which you don’t have to hold in place - you just replay a song if you want. But with spoken word audio (and especially lengthier ones of thirty minutes or even more), you want to be able to keep your place as in a book. The other great thing about m4b for those with the latest iPod models (4th generation or “4G”), is that you can play the files at variable speeds - normal, sped up 20% or slowed 20%. This is particularly useful in order to get through what has become an onslaught of content at at least a slightly faster speed. While these sped-up versions have a few more audio “artifacts,” their pitch doesn’t change as in the old chipmunk voices I could make by changing the recording and playing speeds on those old micro-cassette recorders from back when I was a kid…

The other thing to note, though is that Doppler currently is Win-PC-only, no Mac or Linux versions. It also requires .Net framework to work, which might be incompatible with older versions of Windows.

As I mentioned, there is a growing list of podcasts out there, and these will continue to grow, like blogs. There are millions of blogs out there, and like blogs, it may take a while to figure out which podcasts are your favorites. But because podcasts are a little less immediate then blogs, it may take a little longer. It’s not just a matter of clicking on a link and scanning a couple of posts. Instead, one has to subscribe, download, and then listen to a podcast for at least a few minutes, but probably a lot longer, to figure out whether one is of interest. Because of this, I’ve only been listening to a few select ones so far, but I continue to look for new ones. The few that I listen to are:

Engadget (link to podcast) - I read Engadget’s tech blog religiously, and this is a nice extension of that. However, it is not an audio version of the blog by any means. Rather it is more of a rap (rant?) session by Engadget’s Phillip Torrone often with guest podcaster Lenn Pryor of Microsoft. Whereas the Engadget blog is somewhat matter-of-fact, the podcast is anything but - it is much angrier and “activist” then most of what you see by those at Egadget in written form.

The Dawn and Drew Show (link to podcast) - I’m not really sure what this show is about. It’s not really about anything per se, but just more like listening in on a conversation, one that is just plain goofy sometimes. Dawn Miselli and Drew Domkus are a married couple living in rural Wisconsin and just talk about whatever most of the time. Dawn has this magnetic quality to her voice that just keeps you riveted and in stitches most of the time, but damned if I know why. She continually talks about World Domination, and perhaps her voice is her secret weapon for those plans. Dawn and Drew are one of my few “guilty pleasures” in that I know I’m not getting anything practical out of the show, but I suppose maybe laughter being healthy can be spun to be practical, right?

Morning Stories (link to podcast) - Tony Kahn hosts this NPR show that’s produced at the Boston NPR Afflilate WGBHa show on stories that are produced in a similar way to NPR shows - with care for detail, professionally edited and produced. Consider them a kind of NPR light for podcasting.

Leo Laporte (link to podcast) - Leo Laporte used to be one of the main hosts on TechTV (and ZDTV before that), which was a cable channel that eventually got bought out by a rival computer gaming network which subsequently killed most of its content. He now hosts a local show in Califonia called The Tech Guy where he talks about current news in computers and helps mostly less experienced users get better acquainted with the latest technologies and issues. But Leo’s demeanor is so friendly and informative, that he’s always fun to listen to, and even those of us who consider ourselves tech-savvy can get some useful information out of the show.

Finally, one of the features that might be new in version 2.0 of Doppler Radio (but maybe I just didn’t notice it in my earlier version?) is the ability to search for a podcast. I believe it not only searches the title field, but the description as well. As a lark, I decided to type in ‘NPR’ and I came up with a podcast titled “All Things Considered.” Doing a bit more research, it seems like NPR is experimenting a bit with this new media form. Not only is All Things Considered (link to podcast) being made available, but so is American Public Media’s Future Tense (link to podcast) and New York Public Radio’s (WNYC’s) On the Media (link to podcast)!

I’m glad that NPR is making their content available in this way, but I wonder where it’s going. Up until now, the only way to get NPR content as an archiveable file was to either record it yourself, or to order a recording either from NPR itself or through Audible.com. When I first got XM Satellite Radio, I asked them why they didn’t have any NPR and they said NPR didn’t want to provide its content outside of affiliate stations because these stations would then not have a commodity that they could then fairly request donations for. They do have a point. If you are paying for satellite radio on a monthly basis and getting your NPR fix through it, why would you donate to keep a local affiliate alive? In essence you are paying NPR directly instead of the affiliate. In the same way, if you are retrieving your NPR shows off the internet in order to listen to them whenever you want and wherever you want (via your portable device), then why would you pay your local affiliate? Again, you are paying NPR directly. I don’t know a lot about how the whole affiliate structure works for NPR, but I wonder if all these new media formats including internet radio, satellite radio, and podcasting will eventually spell the death of radio as we know it, including NPR? Most affiliate stations, I think, still produce some of their own content. For example here in the DC area, WAMU produces the nationally syndicated Diane Rehm Show. So I wonder if they can somehow get compensation from NPR for producing conent? What really seems strange to me is that these affiliates have to purchase shows from NPR proper, and yet as more people become more tech-savvy and as average internet speeds and access continues to grow, more and more of their listenership can simply avoid them entirely and go right to NPR. The other really odd thing surrounding all of this is that NPR is publicly funded. Does this mean that it is legally obligated to provide its programming to anyone who wants it for free? If not, is it ethically obligated? I don’t know the answer, but as someone who listens to it, donates to local affiliates, I sometimes wonder about how the mix of public funding, member funding, and large donations by corporations and philanthropists collide and create competing interests. As a fan, I want to see NPR continue. I’m a little less sure about individual affiliate stations, except that I do enjoy the content that was created at these various affiliates. I wonder then, whether NPR should just centralize all the funding stuff and not require it’s affiliates to pay for content. Instead, affiliates could use the money donated to them only on their own home-grown content which could then be offered to other stations in trade deals or for free. Of course I’m talking out of my ass here, but it just seems unlikely that the current structure will make sense in a few years - if it even does now.

At just around 6 months podcasting in general has quite a way to go to become a “mature” media format, but its fast rise in a relatively short period has obviously made some big waves in traditional media. Perhaps print and broadcasting taking the blogging phenomenon for granted for so long and because of it suffering the consequences have motivated a much fast reaction and even adoption of podcasting by these same dinosaurs in an effort to avoid extinction. Traditional media is far from extinct, of course, but there’s a big danger. Even now podcasters are beginning to get small sponsorship deals akin to NPR. They are not commercials in the modern sense, but just paid little blurbs describing a product or site. As convenient as Doppler has become, it can’t get around the problem of the source material. What I mean is that I’ve had the problem that with a bunch of podcasts, only the last episode or the last few are referenced and thus retrievable by the application. Obviously one could easily become overrun with archived podcasts, but it seems like a good option to give people who might want to and have the time to “catch up.” Even now there are some who are not just using audio but actually doing video podcasting. I haven’t tried any of these out partially because my portable device being an iPod, I can’t view video on it. And of course video is much more costly in terms of storage space and bandwidth than audio. Eventually, though, we may see the Internet providing a place for ordinary people to create their own equivalent to TV programming just as podcasting has become an alternative to radio. The broadcasts are in enough trouble as it is, and young people today are apparently turning away from the TV more and more and opting for spending at least some of this time online. I’m hopeful that what blogging has done to smash the traditional media’s hold on what information we receive will be mirrored in a similar way by audio and eventually video podcasting. Such democratization of media can only be a good thing. Traditional journalism has its strengths in professionalism, editing, and financial resources, but many of these are double-edged swords. I don’t think we will see less “professionalism” in these new forms of media. After all, many blogs out there produce such reliable, professional, and thought-provoking material, that they make most of what “professional” media produce look like a joke! Yes many podcasts are generally not quite as streamlined, but this will come with time, especially as former pro journalists become podcasters themselves, and as journalists to be start considering podcasting as a viable career path in addition to traditional journalism.

First, let me apologize for the lack of content here recently. I was traveling for the holidays, developed a cold that made doing anything a real pain, then came back and have been trying to catch up on reading all the gadget news. With CES just ending, it’s been a landslide of content. I just figure it’s still going to be a while, so I want to start writing something. I thought I’d give you a few quick items that I’m planning on writing about in more depth in come days. I figure posting a little bit about them now will give you at least something and it will keep me honest! The theme is definitely content overload, as you will see:

I happened across a program/service that is supposed to act like TiVo but for your radio. If you are a big talk-radio fan, or just a radio fan in general, this might prove really useful. I’m a big NPR addict myself, but I just don’t get the time to listen to the shows I want to all the time. I get busy and it’s really a shame they haven’t come out with something like this already, it would be a lot easier than a TiVo because you don’t have to deal with video and my sense is that scheduling is much more regular for radio. It does this by listening to streaming Internet radio broadcasts and recording these as mp3 files. It will even send them to iTunes so if you have an iPod all the better. The application is called Replay Radio and they have a demo version if you want to try it out. I am probably going to purchase the full version and give a more detailed piece about soon.

Speaking of TiVo, there’s a lot of TiVo news recently, most notably about the newest feature called TiVo ToGo, which will enable people who can use this service to download their TiVo content to their laptop, portable media player, or even to DVD. However, there are some inherent problems that I see with the implementation, which in my mind make it more trouble then it’s worth.

As I think I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve only recently started using TiVo myself, but I purchased a TiVo unit that also records to DVD. In fact, it does so much more easily than via TiVo ToGo. The unit is the Humax DRT-800. I’ve only seen one review of this unit, but I figured I would write a review myself that concentrates on the dvd writing part of the picture and the other things that separate this unit from your average TiVo.

Yesterday I wrote about my last week in radio-synchronicity-nirvana-Zen-whatever. The whole thing was really prompted by Meredith’s post about Yahoo’s Launchcast Radio, which I’ve become quite fond of. Being new to internet radio, its capabilities could be matched or even exceeded by others, but from the little reading I’ve done, the only entities that get close are not big fish and the fact that Yahoo! is a major player on the Internet means that it’s not going to go away any time soon, which is always a concern of mine for net-based services. Here’s a relatively recent article about some other major players in the field.

Yahoo! bought Launchcast from Launch Media in 2001. Launch had debuted the service in 1999 and soon after, quite predictably, was being sued by some of the big record companies and the RIAA. Yahoo inherited at least one of those suits and settled it so that it now has to dole out compensation to these companies for use of the music, and that’s probably where a big percentage of my money is going! It doesn’t make me feel all that great that I’m still supporting those guys, but I’d rather be doing it in a progressive way like this than through having to listen to stupid ads on commercial FM radio or by buying overpriced CD’s for the one or two songs I want to hear. What I would love to see are bands going to Yahoo! directly and bypassing these big record companies altogether. If individual bands could get even a fraction of the cut that I’m sure these companies and the RIAA are getting, I’m sure most of them would be thrilled to cut out the middlemen. Maybe if enough artists switched over to this method - even those currently tied to a company but whose contract runs out relatively soon - these companies would wither to nothing. Sure they’d still be keeping their fat cats rich off of the royalties, but those would start declining as the popularity of a lot of the oldies would as a matter of course… Well, one can dream…

Part of the power of Launchcast is in how you are able to customize it to your tastes. The way this is done is by allowing the user to rate all the numerous genres (and many sub-genres) with either a 1-5 star rating or an even more exact 0 to 100 scale. Within each genre or sub-genre, Launchcast also offers a group of a dozen or so artists which you can rate as well, or, you can simply do searches on artists, songs, or album titles, and then rate each of these individually. As well, each time a song comes up on your “player” you can rate the song, artist, and album. Launchcast uses all these ratings to produce a “station” for you. This artificial intelligence then looks at each person who rates a given artist with a high rating, and tries to figure out among all of these “fans,” which other artists are also highly rated so that it can suggest additional music, some of which you might not have had any idea existed. This is all very impressive to me, but perhaps it’s old hat to many of you. It’s one thing to get better quality sound, fewer (or no) commercials, or more choice in terms of genres, but really customizing radio based on a user’s particular tastes and others who share some of those tastes, to me really is taking radio to the next level. That is why I’m currently paying money for this service. It’s a lot less than satellite radio at $4 (or $3 if you commit for year) per month.

There are only a couple of issues that I have with Launchcast that make it less than perfect for me. One is the fact that so far it doesn’t work in different browsers. It’s a little bit shortsighted to only cater to one browser, Internet Explorer in this case, but I’m hopeful that Yahoo! will fix this problem and will be supporting other browsers, Firefox in particular, in the not-too-distant future. Maybe I’m being a little harsh here, since Firefox has only just gotten out of beta. Doing a little more digging, I discovered a stand-alone application that one can use as your “player” instead of IE. While this is a step backwards in some ways – since you will have to download this onto the PC you are using, which sometimes is not possible – it enables me to do away with IE for my listening. Sure it may be using part of IE’s engine for the application, and you can’t launch it from link on the Launchcast site the way you can with the standard player, but it any time I can avoid using IE proper, I will. This app is called LAUNCHcast Desktop Player Application and was created by Mark Edington. As far as I can tell, it’s only available on the Launchcast Yahoo! Group, but it’s freely distributable, so I’ve uploaded it and provide it here for your use.

The other problem for me is that right now Launchcast is not really portable. Ok, so you can listen to it wherever you have a reasonably fast Internet connection, but really you are still chained to a computer, even if it’s just a laptop. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m wondering if Launhcast will work on a portable PocketPC device running IE? With a wifi card in it, one could theoretically take it around and listen to it at a Starbucks or public wifi hotspots, or even over a 3G cellular network on a PocketPC-based smartphone. For the present I’m not sure what can really be done about it. Wifi is becoming more popular with the consumer and more devices and computers are coming equipped with wifi capability. Some city and town governments are looking at providing it for free (Phili has just approved such a plan), but the point is that it’s still very localized. Most hotspots are still only 802.11B, whose range is only a hundred or so feet. 802.11G is a little better but not much, and besides it’s not nearly as popular as B even though G has been out now for a couple of years. 802.11N is the next standard and the first one where we are starting to see really significant range (in the many hundreds of feet) and speed increases. It hasn’t been approved yet, and although there are “pre-N” devices already being sold, there’s no guarantee these will work with the final standard, so most are holding off for now. Still, it’s taken years for a relatively small (considering the overall geography) number of 802.11B hotspots to become available in the U.S. There are even the more advanced wireless protocols “Wimax” and “Mobile-Fi” that offer the promise of considerably larger ranges and speeds even than 802.11N. The range might allow for repeaters to be spaced out as much as current cell towers are to provide a smiliarly complete coverage area. But there are many obstacles to this kind of universal service, including technical, economical, regulatory, etc. For the foreseeable future, we’re stuck. Or are we?

In addition to what I’ve mentioned, Launchcast has some other nifty features like allowing you to view a history of everything you’ve heard on your station. Didn’t get around to rating something you really liked 3 songs ago, just go into your history and get the information about it. You can’t actually play it again on demand, but that is part of what makes Launchcast “radio” as opposed to a just a virtual collection of music that you play at will. That sort of on-demand capability, while desirable in one way, doesn’t get to the heart of one of the key advantages I see with how radio works. When you let someone else choose for you, you are, it’s true, giving up some control of what you listen to at any given time. The amount of control of course depends on what you are listening to, with standard FM radio being at the lower end of the spectrum (although you can at least theoretically choose the genre you want to hear), and a service like Launchcast at the other end. But when you give up some of that control, you can actually gain by being “forced” to listen to music you’ve never heard before. Some assuredly you will never want to listen to again, but others will be great new finds. I’m no longer in high school where classmates would hand me their personally recorded mix tapes, or in a dorm where lots of different people with different musical tastes would introduce me to all kinds of stuff I’d never heard before. And since I don’t listen to much music on the regular radio anymore, this has provided me for the first time in years a way to expand my playlist. In that vein, if you know someone else’s Yahoo! ID that uses Launchcast, you can listen to their station too, and if you share their tastes, you can name them as an “influencer.” Doing so will cause Launchcast to start to introduce into your station some of the music that plays on your influencer(s) stations. I haven’t yet chosen any influencers because I don’t know anyone else personally who uses Launchcast, and I feel like I’m still building my own station with doing all the rating, but I’m sure I will get around to adding some eventually.

With that in mind, I thought I’d provide a link (which will henceforth be in the left column of my Blog if you view it in a web page by its url – twelveblackcodemonkeys.com) to my station. I’m sure it will differ considerably from many of the people reading this, but that’s the fun – you get to listen to things you might not even know existed, or at least get to know someone else’s tastes in a more tangible way. To give you some fair warning, my station combines some alternative rock, jazz, classical, movie soundtracks, and a smidgeon of folk, Latin, world, and classic rock. I would say the bulk is alternative rock, jazz, and classical though.

As you probably know by now, I’m a big fan of “gadgets.” When I picture a “gadget” I get the image of some kind of portable device that utilizes technology. I think the first “gadget” that was commonly used was the portable transistor radio, although it was a bit before my time. However, I was present for the revolution of the Walkman, and remember my first one from 1980 that was bulky and heavy. Maybe that’s what initiated my future love for this type of device.

Having been involved with the Internet in one form or another for about 12 years now, I feel a little ashamed about certain parts of it that I have simply not gotten to play with much. IRC is one of those things. Although I did try it out a few times, it just never appealed to me, whereas I took to instant messaging immediately. The other biggie is Internet radio. The one or two times in the past that I listened to it, I was not at all impressed. Historically the problem was poor quality due to lack of bandwidth. Why listen to something that to me sounded like AM quality when I had a perfectly good FM radio to play, let alone my own collection of CD’s?

All of this changed this week. Somehow everything came together this week and it became for me a seminal Week of the Radio! First I read a piece by Meredith about Launchcast Radio, an internet radio service that’s owned by Yahoo! Then I get an early Christmas present of a Grundig shortwave radio. Finally, Treonaughts posted a great article about how to stream Internet radio broadcasts through the Treo using Pocket Tunes.

My radio-listening habits have changed a lot over the years. I didn’t listen to radio that much growing up, preferring the records and cassettes of my parents and then later of my own. Then when I was 16, a classmate gave me a Pink Floyd album and I suddenly became obsessed with classic rock. I became a big listener of “AOR” (Album Oriented Radio) at the time, which in New York City meant 92.3 K-Rock, a station that had just gone on the air – just in time to broadcast the first Bandaid concert live.

When I got to college a couple of years later, my tastes for whatever reason started swinging more towards alternative rock and New Age. In Boston at that time there was a great alternative station called WFNX 101.7, which apparently is still around, and another older station, 104.1 WBCN, that was doing lots of experimenting with different genres including alternative rock, classic rock, and even some rap and R&B. There were also some college stations and MIT had one (88.1 WMBR) that played some really bizarre stuff on Friday and/or Saturday nights. At Boston University, where I was attending college, there was a communications school where I took a few classes (actually I transferred into it for a year when I thought I was going to become a journalist), and their main building also housed the public radio station 90.9 WBUR – where the Click and Clack actually broadcasted from before they moved to Harvard Square. By my senior year, I was listening to a lot of NPR. I thoroughly enjoyed their in-depth coverage over the sensationalized or “dumbed down” reporting that has historically existed in much of commercial mainstream media. While some have accused NPR for being a bit snobby, I still find it to have much better reporting than the alternatives. If the choice is between in-debth and snobby on the one hand and shallow, sensationalistic and dumbed down on the other, I’ll have to go with the former…

During college I also listened to a lot of shortwave radio. For those unfamiliar with it, it is a set of frequencies above the normal FM band which are used to communicate programs internationally – you need a specially equipped radio in order to receive these. Stations were primarily state-owned and geared towards those outside of the country. Kind of a PR tool or propaganda if you will. They have pretty horrible sound quality as well, something on par with AM. The U.S. has it’s own shortwave network called Voice Of America. What I listened to during college was primarily Radio Moscow, the Soviet state shortwave radio station. It was fascinating to me because I was generally interested in Russia at the time (I majored in Russia) and the Soviet Union was in the midst of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika and Glasnost’. You could listen to the talk shows and round tables where journalists debated social problems, which was unheard of just a few years earlier. When I first started listening they were still vehement in their stance against the west, but during those years you could tell they were beginning to question even foreign policy issues (particularly their disastrous foray into Afghanistan) and some of the defensiveness was being replaced by honest talk.

After college, I don’t really remember listening to much. I vaguely remember being on a jazz kick briefly when I was working in New York in between college and grad school, but a bad breakup with a girlfriend at the time made me turn towards less soothing stuff and more towards some of the angry alternative stuff from earlier like Throwing Muses. In Grad School (Charlottesville, VA) during the early 1990’s there was a real dearth of good stations. Most of them seemed to be top-40 or Country in genre. When I moved to DC in ‘95 after two and a half years in Charlottesville, I was amazed that my “alternative” radio had become the mainstream. Top-40 stations were now playing Nirvana! I settled on a 99.1 WHFS, which had a rich history in DC as being alternative for something like 20 years, way more than anyone else in the area. But even back then people were saying that it had lost a lot of its character, and I was soon realizing that it too was beginning to sound more like a top-40 channel with tons of commercials and songs that you would hear sometimes half a dozen times per day!

Again I started listening to NPR, and the DC area has a couple of great NPR stations. 88.5 WAMU is a station that is now only talk, although when I was first listening part of the day was taken up with hours of bluegrass music. 90.9 WETA is a combination talk and classical music channel, like a lot of stations that host public radio. I’d always enjoyed classical music. WBUR in Boston played it in addition to its NPR broadcasts. But I was by no means an aficionado. Slowly, listening to WETA, I’ve become more familiar with it over the years and it’s gotten a larger and larger share of my listening time.

Then Satellite Radio came to town. I remember hearing about it on NPR of all places back in 2000 I think and I was really looking forward to it, since I had had some experience with the music channels on Satellite TV. Those Satellite TV channels were a cool idea – I loved the lack of commercials, the great sound quality, and the fact that you could very quickly decide exactly what genre you wanted. Oh, also the fact that each song name and the album it was on and the artist performing it were all on the screen while it played, allowing you to note it down if you really liked the song. At the same time, though, I felt really silly using the TV as a radio. The TV was something to watch, and at the time I shared a TV with two or three other guys in our group house and in general we WERE watching something most of the time. About two years ago, I finally took the plunge and bought an XM radio – a Delphi Skifi - which I could listen to in the car, then bring to the office and listen to it there via a boombox that the module fit into. Having Satellite radio in the car was great for long trips when you don’t know which stations you’re going to be near or can’t quite pick them up. You can always have access to your favorite music or news. Like the Satellite TV music channels, you got the names of the artist and song, although there’s a point at which these would cut off if they were too long. My main problem was that being an NPR junky, the news stations on XM (just audio feeds mainly of various cable news channels like CNN, Fox, etc.), really didn’t do it for me. I felt not having NPR was a huge oversight, but while the competing satellite company has a couple of NPR shows, they are pretty minimal compared to the large collection available on a regular station. When I contacted XM about this, they said that NPR felt if they allowed XM to broadcast their programs, local public stations wouldn’t continue to get the same revenue in donations. So I found that except for the occasional long trip, I really wasn’t using it much in the car. At work I was using it primarily to listen to classical music because that was the least disruptive to those around me – or to myself when trying to do work that required a lot of concentration. So I was paying $11 per month to listen to classical music, which I could have done for free by bringing in a standard radio. So after about a year I finally sold my radio to a friend.

While I generally don’t listen to that much recorded music on CD, MP3, etc. these days, the main thing that HAS taken me away from radio is the audio book. I’ve written about Audible.com a bunch of times here. I subscribed to this service almost five years ago. Being a slow reader makes it all the more attractive – suddenly you are able to use the time which would ordinarily be very difficult if not impossible to read a book (driving, exercising, etc.) With the large number of unabridged books available, you can easily spend huge amounts of time listening. I don’t know what the average book length is, but the ones in my queue run between 4 hours to over 20. I’ve read a good 60 books at least over the years and have at least that number still unread but purchased and waiting in my queue.

So, getting back to the present, as I mentioned, last week Meredith posted about Launchcast Radio and I decided to give it a shot. After playing with it for a few days, I became so enamored with it that I signed up for their paying service called Launchcast Plus. Launchcast combines some of the same ideas that satellite radio does by offering a large number of stations based on genre. However, the way they distinguish themselves is by customizing the music you hear to the individual’s preferences. This entry is becoming extremely long, so I’m going to post some more detailed thoughts about Launchcast in a future entry. Treonaughts posted as well about another type of “broadcasting” technology similar to how Launchcast works. However, Shoutcast streams are streams of MP3 files, and it’s been around for at least 5 years. Because MP3’s can be compressed at different rates, one can provide different streams that vary so that someone on a T1 connection down to someone on a 33.6 modem or even GPRS connection can receive the stream.

The trend towards ubiquitous wireless connectivity will mean more portable devices that can receive this kind of streaming, and so the last remaining problem with this technology will be solved and will eventually supplant the standard FM broadcast, which has gotten increasingly outdated. Delphi’s new MiFi portable XM receiver, while not internet streaming, shows another hint at the future of radio. It contains a small onboard hard drive that allows you to “timeshift” your radio programming, finally bringing a technology that was introduced for TV five years ago via TiVo and ReplayTV. When all these technologies will merge is somewhat unpredictable. While wireless networs were rare 5 years ago, they still have a long way to go to get close to the universal coverage of cell phones, and the fact that you can use them to make telephone calls without subscribing to a phone company means that mobile phone companies in particular will not be making it easy for these networks to take off. At the same time, so many people see the incredible power that this would provide that its inevitable. Already cities like Philidelphia are agreeing to make wifi a freely available public utility, and New York has been asking for proposals from various companies to do set up a high-speed ubiquitous network for some time. At this rate it seems likely that the internet will supplant radio as the main method of communication for audio broadcasting, and probably eventually video as well. Unfortunately the FCC will still be involved, but I’m hoping it will only be to regulate the technical aspect of things so that one wireless network, technology, or hotspot can’t interfere with others. But according to recent statements it sounds like the FCC wants to remake itself into an arbiter for all things that get communicated via the Internet as well. No doubt it sees where things are headed and doesn’t want to lose all the power it currently has to individuals or various technology companies.

XM, the more successful of the two satellite radio companies that began transmitting a couple of years ago, has decided to expand its reach to internet broadcasting. I used to own an XM radio, and while I enjoyed the better-than-FM quality of XM, and the freedom to keep listening to my favorite station no matter where I was (as long as I was outside that is), I eventually decided to get rid of it because I didn’t feel like I was using it enough to justify the $11/month they charge. I can certainly see it being worth that much or more for people who listen to the radio more, but for the most part I tend to listen to audio books or NPR, and XM does not carry NPR (Sirius, XM’s competitor, carries a very limited slate of second-tier NPR shows).

This new method of broadcasting I’m not so sure about. I’ve never really been that into internet radio, believe it or not. Even with a DSL connection at home, streaming audio to where it’s actually somewhat equivalent to FM quality usually slows down everything else. Doing anything else on the computer that requires uploading or downloading large files makes the connection flakey. Aside from this, I live an area that has two NPR stations, and of course a fair variety of musical genres to pick from, although I can see where having a college radio station or a station that played a more eclectic mix of genres (zydeco, Caribbean, African, Brazilian, etc) would be nice. The nice thing about the XM radio I owned, the Delphi SkyFi, was that I could use it in the car, then unplug it and hook it up to a boom box made specifically for it in the office or at home. It was “portable!” Since then Delphi has come out with other modular XM radio devices that don’t even require a proprietary boom box. Maybe once Wimax enables constant 70mbps connections to the internet for any enabled mobile phone the internet radio broadcasts may finally become truly portable (at the huge expense of these phones’ battery life!), but until then it’s simply another way to listen to the radio when one has a higher-speed connection. If XM simply offers this as an added feature to current XM subscribers, great! Then they won’t have to deal with modular devices like the SkyFi. I supposed it’s also a remedy for those who don’t want to spend $100 or more on a satellite radio itself (let alone installation fees for your car, etc.), but still a nice array of channels to listen to at the office. Then again, aren’t there already a whole bunch of completely free internet radio channels???

National Public Radio has been derided by conservatives as being an example of a liberal slant in the media. Maybe this is true, maybe not. But to me more than being slanted towards one side or another, NPR distinguishes itself as being thoughtful and in-depth rather than based on fluff and stereotypes. They don’t base what stories they do on the old adage “if it bleed it leads” because they are not out to gain the highest ratings in order to maintain funding via advertising. They have been ridiculed as being elitist, snooty, pretentious, etc. There are definitely times where I get this feeling too, and I’m probably less likely to get it because I’ve been listening to them for so long. Despite its flaws, NPR is an incredible resource of information. You may not trust everything that you hear, but neither should you from any one source of media, be it NPR, Howard Stern, or CNN. There are inherent biases no matter how much someone puts on a show of being “objective.” Fox’s whole “fair and balanced” mantra is nonsense. What they are is a network that has a very definite slant towards the right. I know some may say it just seems that way because most of the media is so far to the left that Fox seems like it’s to the right even though it’s really in the middle, but that doesn’t ring true to me. It has many obviously conservative commentators and only one admittedly liberal one. I admit I haven’t watched it since we got rid of cable a year or so ago, so I can’t speak to it’s current state, but somehow I don’t think it’s changed much.

I first stumbled onto NPR in college. When I was growing up, I simply never heard it in our house. It would have fit in, since my mom is a news junky, but we were too fixated on TV and I don’t think there was a 24-hour NPR station in NYC in the 70’s and 80’s, although I could be wrong. In high school I was listening to K-Rock in NYC, which played classic rock. Then towards the end of high school, or perhaps the beginning of college, I started listening to a shortwave radio I had bought. It was a whole new world. Shortwave broadcasts are generally government run stations from around the world without commercials and with very in-depth coverage in addition to a wide array of different programming. I was particularly interested in listening to Radio Moscow at the time as I had started to study Russian and was very interested in the country and it’s struggles in trying to open itself after 70 years of tyranny. As it turned out, I actually transferred into the school of communications at Boston University in my Sophomore year, this after realizing that Astronomy was 90% math and 10% physics or thereabouts, and that I had a foundation in neither. My thought was that I would study journalism and potentially become a foreign correspondent, hopefully in Russia. I eventually learned that one normally didn’t have one’s choice in where one went on assignment, and moreover the journalism classes I took did not leave me particularly enthralled. However, the school of communications at BU also housed an NPR studio, WBUR, and at the time I recall the Car Talk guys broadcasted from this building, although I never actually saw them. Being such a fan of NPR now, I wish I had taken more advantage of being at this school and gotten more involved in radio.

Naked in Baghdad is a book written by a veteran foreign correspondent from NPR, Anne Garrels. In it she recounts her time in Baghdad both leading up to, during, and after the U.S.-led invasion of last year. If you listen to NPR, Garrels’ voice is immediately recognizable. She rattles off insightful details in a way that rivets you, and you can tell she is intimately in tune with her surroundings. She tells her story matter-of-factly, and although she laces it with personal experiences that exposes her vulnerabilities and not-so-pretty side, she keeps her reporter’s steady tone, as if she is reporting on someone else’s story and not necessarily her own.

The story Garrels tells is a fascinating one. She first came to Baghdad months before the invasion and witnessed a regime trying to hold onto it’s grip while also trying to avoid war with the least amount of concessions. What I found most insightful was her reports on Iraqis and their opinions about America and the Iraqi regime. Much of this, especially before the war really got under way, was something Garrels has to interpret from indirect statements. Once the war has started and especially after the U.S. has successfully taken Baghdad, she gets to voice much more open opinion from the Iraqi people and it is a contradictory and diverse opinion. Iraqis, she reports, are grateful that Americans have ended Sadam’s hated regime, but also feel humiliated that a foreign power had to do this for them. They are a proud people in other words. They were also fearful not so much about the war itself as they had faith in the accuracy of the U.S.’s bombs, but about what might ensue after the actual invasion had concluded, and here it seems they have not been proven totally incorrect. There is still, one year later, a great deal of uncertainty about what will happen in Iraq. Will the disparate groups, many of which carry great animosity for one another based on sides taken during all the power plays over the last 30 years, ever be able to live together peacefully? No one knows.
I listened to an unabridged version of this book via Audible.com, and recommend this as the most natural way to ingest the book, since it is written by a radio correspondent. Interspersed between different sections of the book are “Brenda Bulletins” which are letters that Garrels’ husband Vint Lawrence wrote to an email list of Garrels’ friends to update them on her travails. So we hear Garrels’ own reporting, then we here Vint’s, which reworks it, by both putting it in the third person, but ironically making it more personal in some ways. I had mixed feelings about this device. In some ways, it might actually help in that it gives two different voices to the story, making it more heterogeneous and thus more interesting. On the other hand, there’s a lot of information that is simply repeated, and some of Vint’s letters are so stylized, especially after Garrels’ directness, it sometimes seems a bit flakey or pretentious. This may also have to do with Vint’s voice, which sometimes seems a bit affected compared to Garrels. Vint’s letters do seem to get more poignant and less playful and punny towards the end, thankfully, but then again perhaps I was just getting more used to them by that point. Of course this is only my opinion and I’m sure that others might actually have the view that these letters add to the overall experience. In any case, the book, especially the audio version of it is an extremely interesting, exciting, and poignant portrayal of what it was like for one reporter who actually stayed in Baghdad from before the war started to after the U.S. had secured the city, one of only a handful of journalists who did so.

I love to read, but I’ve been cursed with this lack of ability to read at any reasonable pace. I’ve tried speed-reading on my own and through a class but without extreme dedication to the program, it’s just not worked. The fact that it takes so long to read for me (generally in the vicinity of 10-20 pages per hour) makes it much harder to pick up a book in the first place. After all, if it takes you forever to read a book, you can spend that time a lot more efficiently elsewhere.

Back in college I got addicted to talk radio. I’m not talking about Howard Stern or Dr. Laura. Rather I was an NPR junky and even listened to short-wave stations from around the world. This was when the USSR was first starting to open up a little with Gorbachev’s Glasnost and listening to the state-run propaganda while they were trying to muddle their way to more open discussion of at least domestic matters was fascinating. Anyway, I began to see that one could listen and learn stuff and not have to be tied to one spot (vis-à-vis a walkman), or even have one’s full attention one thing. After grad school when I got a car and started commuting to work (some of these commutes could be long), I would listen to the radio all the time. Although I still enjoy NPR, especially in the last few years, much of the news has been rather depressing. I would rather glance at Washingtonpost.com or CNN.com when I get to work, then to be drowned in very in depth coverage of a rather depressing issue. So audio books seem to be the best solution. You can pick the topic and it can be a serious look at history, a language lesson, a travel narrative, a mystery, or really anything you’re in the mood for. You’re not at the mercy of others for what you will hear.

Many of you may have read my previous book reviews here, most of which have actually been reviews of books I listened to as opposed to “reading.” I use a service called Audible.com. It’s been around now for several years and they have quite a nice selection of books, a lot of them being unabridged and read by the authors or by skilled narrators. You can buy books ala carte, and even in this way you save a good amount over what you would pay for, say a book on tape or CD in a bookstore. But the real savings comes when you subscribe to one of their “listener” plans. I am on one that gives you two books a month for $20. $10 for a recent best seller in print is a steal, let alone an audio version of it. They also have tons of magazines, radio shows, and newspapers in their catalog that you can either subscribe to or just buy individual editions. Many of these are even on a daily basis like the New York Times digest or various public radio shows.

Because of Audible I’ve probably read 60+ books in the last few years, probably a 10-fold increase in what I was doing before that with standard printed books. This brings me to the part of the blog-entry that is hardest. It’s the one where I grovel for financial support. Actually, not quite that bad, but just a request that if you’ve found my reviews and info about Audible helpful and you happen to then subscribe to them, I would be grateful if when asked you entered my audible id (‘leviwallach’) when asked who referred you. I get a couple of free books when people do this, not cash, and you can in turn recommend them to others and get the same thanks in return. Grovel, grovel.