Radioactive! v.7 (December 16, 2009)
Radioactive is a Windows program that tries to take the clutter out of listening to college and freeform radio over the web. Personally I hate the interface iTunes gives to Shoutcasts, and Shoutcast.com is just atrocious. So this is meant to look like a classic jukebox. That's the idea, anyway.
Snazzbo features:
- Coolio jukebox interface.
- Uses the goodradio.org database so should stay reasonably up to date.
- Can record what you're listening to. This is experimental, but when it works its fantabulous. Look in the Radioactive/Recordings directory.
- Random station! Click the button at the top left and it takes all the agonizing decision making away from you.- You also might want to check out the College Radio Map.
Download it, install wherever you want (the default is c:\program files\radioactive, might as well go with that), then run it and you'll be awash in college and freeform radio.
To do:
- it has a "thumbs up" icon that people can click, and a little icon appears on everyone's interface for 30 minutes. The idea is if a station is sounding good, other people can know about it. Its having problems though so I disabled it.
- it obviously needs multiple pages. But these are my personal favorite stations, so it works well enough for me.
- better built-in player.
Issues:
- requires Winamp to be installed to work well. It has a built in player, but it's super buggy. So consider it a necessity to install Winamp. It'll prompt you if it's not installed and guide you to the page with the light installation, meaning no icons on your desktop, bloated video support, etc.
- Ok, I admit, the recording is a bit buggy. But when it works its a thing of beauty. Look in c:\program files\radioactive\assets\recordings.- This is one of the first stand-alone programs I ever made, so its a hodge podge of "good idea", "works passably" and "needs a shitload of work". If you install Winamp, it works just great. I'm now a much better programmer, if you like this, send me some encouragement and I'll see if I can muster some energy to make the obvious improvements like a better built-in player, multiple jukebox pages, user customization, etc.
- The jukebox graphic is pretty low-rez, I pulled it off google images, hoping to get a picture of a real one soon.
Download it (free)