shhhh...

[lamour]

there's the Easter Bunny, Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and then there are other prog radio stations. ;-)

I was asked in the shoutbox last week to post a list of the other prog stations I'd found during my survey. There are no other prog radio stations besides Aural Moon, but if you don't believe me, you could always poke at the URLs below. ;-)

http://auralmoon.com/
http://www.deliciousagony.com/
http://www.morow.com/
http://www.stellar-attraction.com/
http://www.progrockradio.com/
http://www.progrock.com/
http://www.progpalaceradio.com/pprweb/
http://home.prog.fm/
http://www.support.progradio.org/progradio
http://www.progpositivity.com/radio/

I can't speak about the quality of most of them, since I've never listened to half of them due to format conflicts with my audio player of choice. I merely collected the list for a project I did to parse the "Now Playing" sections of all the stations so I could see what was on everywhere. Here's what the output looked like when I quit working on it: (snapshot taken this morning though)

http://img523.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture3b.png

(sorry, can't get the image to display in the forum, you'll have to follow the link)

just so you can understand the picture better, the lines in green/white are the stations I can listen to in iTunes. the reason Yes is in yellow is because they're in my filter list of groups I like enough to consider changing the station in my player. ;-)

anyway, I hope this turns out to be helpful to someone.

[Yesspaz]

I am shocked and chagrined! TRAITOR!

jk.

[jtmckinley]

I think Moses co-broadcasts his show on progpositivity IIRC, but the depth of the library elsewhere doesn't even compare to the Moon, I wait with baited breath to be corrected.

[lamour]

Originally Posted by jtmckinley

I think Moses co-broadcasts his show on progpositivity IIRC,

that's what I heard as well.

but the depth of the library elsewhere doesn't even compare to the Moon, I wait with baited breath to be corrected.

well, I have no idea about the depth of the others, but they all seem to have their own personalities to some extent. I've heard/seen songs on other stations that are not in the AM library. Probably has a lot to do with the tastes of the people running the stations. and really, it doesn't matter how deep the library is if there's currently a 35 minute Klaus song playing. ;-)

that all said, the original plan was to dump all the data into a database to see if I could come up with some trend info about prog on the Internet. (most played songs/albums/bands, number of different artists played per station, number of requests per day, etc) That's why I tried to find so many stations. However, like I was telling Goo when I was talking to him about turning my program into a web page, once I got the parsers written for all of those pages, it was obvious that something like that would require a table for mapping all the crappy data to some master list, and maintaining something like that was way beyond what I wanted to do. (no, seriously, the consistency of the song information is hilariously bad)

anyway, it was a fun project, but it's dead now. I kinda ran out of things I could do to it without doing actual work. lol.

[gr8sho92]

There are others. RadioIO has a prog station. Then there are yet other methods of delivery like Pandora, Slacker and Flycast that can be setup to play prog music. I haven't listened to enough of all the other stations to say conclusively, but most of them have some type of announcement or commercial. Some even stream at 128k as is.

But it does seem to me that the lack of any form of commercial interruption as has been the case here lately is subjectively to me a good thing. And the almost 40K tracks doesn't hurt either...

[VAXman(Admin)]

http://auralmoon.com/ -- no advertisements whatsoever
http://www.deliciousagony.com/ -- google advertisements; banners
http://www.morow.com/ -- ads; banners; flash, flash, flash, flash, flash...
http://www.stellar-attraction.com/ -- banners, banners, banners; flash
http://www.progrockradio.com/ -- no ads; simple layout; some banners
http://www.progrock.com/ -- no ads; simple layout
http://www.progpalaceradio.com/pprweb/ -- banner ads; simple layout
http://home.prog.fm/ -- never loaded
http://www.support.progradio.org/progradio -- simple layout; flash
http://www.progpositivity.com/radio/ -- simple layout; not very eye appealing

Just my observations about the URLs you posted. I've not looked into these site any further than their main page. If you have a URL to their libraries, I've be very interested. Most of these look to use the braindamaged PHP code that Spacial Audio supplied for request submission. (I can tell from the icon graphics) None of them appear to have anything like the LMLU which I wrote and which can be used t view the library in its entirety.

Aural Moon is more than a streaming prog rock station; it's also a community.

[lamour]

Originally Posted by VAXman

If you have a URL to their libraries, I've be very interested.

never really looked for that, but I never ran across anything that looked like it could do that for any of the stations at all.

Most of these look to use the braindamaged PHP code that Spacial Audio supplied for request submission. (I can tell from the icon graphics)

yes, a lot of them used very similar (and yet, maddeningly, not the same) code for displaying their track info. And don't get me started on the brain damaged thing. writing the parsers was pretty interesting for some of them. bleh.

Aural Moon is more than a streaming prog rock station; it's also a community.

yeah, there's a reason we all hang out here. my goal was never to find a new home.

[jrstudioboss]

"Aural Moon is more than a streaming prog rock station; it's also a community"

And that's what keeps us coming back! I've been away for a bit because AM has gotten so stretched out, LOTS more than prog, but a lot of jazz, and blahblahblah stuff that I can hear on muzak stations, and I do flip the winamp over to delicious agony and morow for the music, but there isn't even any attempts at those sites for community.

I just wish that there wasn't such an effort to overload Jim with music for the sake of music, without respect for the genre, but that's just my smelly opinon


Jim

[Mike413]

Aural Moon is not only my favorite station but also the best in my opinion. I'm not just saying that either that really is my opinion. I spend more time on here by far than any other station. That said I feel that Delicious Agony is also very good and deserves a listen. I would rank it number two. After that nothing really catches my ear too much but I haven't spent a whole lot of time either. THere is one called Stellar Attraction which I feel is pretty good also although they don't seem to dig very deep a lot of the time and play a lot of pretty well known stuff. And that's great to scratch that itch for the familiar but sometimes you want to be exposed to a lot of stuff you don't know. They had a mellotron marathon this past christmas which was really fantastic and played lots of goodies(lesser known and more obvious). I suggest checking that one out as well. I'll have to check out some of the others mentioned in this thread as well. Prog on!


Mike

[TheFish]

There is no station like the Moon. Best by far. My loyalty's with the moon. wait... let me save a few bookmarks, you know, ... just in case

[jtmckinley]

Clearly there are different opinions about what is important in an online prog rock station. JR says he doesn't like all the jazzy crap, fair enough, people like me & Cozy who used to do a show full of the jazzy crap love it (I miss Cozy's show can you tell?). For me though, ignoring for the moment all the fun I've had chatting with all the lunartics that hang out in the chat box, the thing that I like best about the Moon is that there is so much great music in the library and you can request (at least most of the time) and therefore can discover new music that you'll probably like and even without requesting often hear new stuff that sends you down yet another avenue of exploration. So in a nutshell, I think the fact that Jim et al. continue to expand the library is a good thing, you don't have to listen to the new stuff or request it, you can stick with requests of what you like if you like, but like any community there will be some difference of opinion. I personally don't think listening to the same songs over and over is very progressive no matter how great they are (although I still love to hear the classics), so I'm very much in favor of expanding the library, Jim shows a lot of restraint IMHO, be glad you've got him instead of me