Homeland Security: Tuning Into Internet Tracks
This blog post references my hands-on feature article ‘Homeland Security: Monitoring And Manipulating Remote Residences‘ in EDN’s November 22, 2007 edition. It’s one of a series of web addendums to the print writeup.
The same geological features that prevent my robust reception of over-the-air television (as mentioned in one of yesterday’s posts) also complicate my aspiration to tune in strong radio signals. While I ‘might’ be able to snag a solid channel or two from the bedroom system upstairs (I won’t know for sure until after I get around to setting it up), FM acquisition from the residence’s main level is best-case hit-and-miss. Which frankly is no big deal; I don’t have any particular fondness for talk radio or DJ chatter, and I’ve got plenty of other (and interruption-free) tune sources available to me. In addition to the 10,000+ tracks’ worth of CD-ripped material stored on my network drive (and duplicated in AAC format for iPod compatibility), I regularly listen via my computer to content from Sirius Internet Radio and Yahoo Music.
I stream the Internet-sourced music from the PC to my home theater system via an Apple Airport Express (conceptually similar to how I get audio-plus-video content from the PC to the TV via Belkin’s PureAV RemoteTV), whereas I can directly access network drive-stored music from either the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 in the home theater stack courtesy of the TwonkyMedia UPnP server software running on my Infrant-now-NETGEAR ReadyNAS.
I’ve heard good things about Last.fm and Pandora from friends, but haven’t yet tried either service. And of course, plenty of Internet radio stations now exist (the Roku Radio service bundled with my SoundBridge M1001 has a database of thousands of ‘em), although a longstanding, heated debate over royalties may result in most of them going silent of copyright holders get their way (nothing like cutting off your nose to spite your face, eh?).
