Thursday, May 21, 2009

Look what I found!

When I first started working at inMotion it was quiet. Too quiet. The silence was deafening. I'm one of those people who can only concentrate with noise going on in the background. Talking, music... anything but the buzzing of fluorescent tubes. It's the city version of the cricket sound they use to show silence. It's the sound of the absence of sound. Brrrr....

Anyway, I hunted around online for music when I finally got my computer speakers and chucked the earbuds and iPod that made me seem aloof and antisocial. At first I went to my favourite local radio stations online but their commercials drove me more crazy than they do in my car.

I tried something called songza which is almost like a free mp3 service. You collect songs you like in a folder and play them. My issue was that lots of the versions were crappy and sometimes you'd get a video as well. How can I work with not only Bono singing "Gloria" but his bouncing mullet tempting me to watch his teen self lurch (I mean dance) through the video? Not good.

Then a co-worker told me about RadioIO (radio eye-o). Holy crap, where has it been all my life? There are different channels and I can listen to anything I want (although a show tunes channel wouldn't go amiss), but I usually listen to 80's New Wave and Idols. They play the most obsure stuff on the New Wave channel (when was the last time you heard Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party" over the airwaves? And the Idol station plays stuff fresh from the night before so I got to hear Adam Lambert singing Mad World again the very next day. To top it off, if you make a request via email, they play it nearly right away. Sweet!

Yes, I know this sounds like an ad but I promise you they're not paying me anything. I just love it and have to tell everyone I know. It's seriously good.

kxx

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