live365.com

Author's product rating:   

Transmission quality	good
Range of radio shows	very good
Quality of radio shows	average
How good are the presenters?	not applicable
Stability of broadcast	good

Advantages:	Choice
Disadvantages:	American

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I have a problem. No, I had a problem, until two weeks ago. As a real music lover, I was really sick of listening to the radio. Every day they throw commercial crap on the air. And not only the mainstream radios. It seems that the alternative radios play their own commercial alternative music nowadays! Really fed up with this crap I didn’t know what to listen to anymore. How could I learn new kinds of music, non-commercial music? Hmmmm… problem…. Until two days ago. Apparently there are radios on the net. Maybe you know, but I didn’t! (at least I didn’t know you could listen to them for free) I’m using the internet for 7 years now, and it was the first time I listened to them, and you know what… it’s the solution for my problem! The radios I listen to are located on www.live365.com, so that’s the site I’m going to talk about.

SIGN UP
------------
The first thing you need to do, is to sign up of course. They need your e-mail address, your zip and you country, that’s all. (just watch out they don’t make you sign up for bloody mailing lists) Then they instantly send you an e-mail and you must confirm. Just the usual stuff really.

HOW IT WORKS
----------------------
Live365 contains hundreds and hundreds of different radios. To listen to them, you have 4 possibilities:
a) Player365: that’s their own player, they recommend it. You can download it for free through their site
b) RealPlayer 7.0 or higher
c) Any MP3 player
d) Windows Media Player: although the site automatically started using this player, they don’t recommend it. They pretend it can cause long buffering delays. Indeed I occasionally had a few buffering problems, but I don’t think a program itself can cause buffering delays. They’re probably just trying to encourage people to use their own player. The only time when I have buffering delays, it’s more likely to be due to the radio itself. More about the difference between radios later.
To listen to the radios, you need a good internet connection of course. Personally, I have a DSL connection, so no problem for me. However, if you still use a old 28k/33k/56k modem I don’t think it would be a good idea to listen to online radio.

THE WEBSITE
-------------------

-> LAY-OUT <-
It could look better. For instance, they use a white text on a dark-blue background. Everyone will agree there’s nothing easier to read than black text on a white background. Another thing they could improve is the width of the web site: it doesn’t adjust. On my 17’ inch screen here at a resolution of 1280*1024, it uses only half of my screen. Rather silly isn’t it? Luckily, this counts only for the homepage, the other pages do adjust.
Finally, you’ll be glad to hear that the advertising is rather sober.

-> STRUCTURE <-
A very clear structure. On top of your screen you can choose “Listen”, “Broadcast”, “Community”, “Help” and “About us”. Can it get more clear than this? In the next paragraphs I’ll discuss these section, except the obvious “About us”.

-> LISTEN <-
Here you get a listing of all the radio stations. You can sort them by description, broadcaster, speed, rating, and number of listeners. There is also a search engine to find the radio of your choice. I’m not very satisfied with this search engine due to the fact that it’s impossible to search a radio having for example “Nightwish” in their playlist, unless they’ve put it in their description.
Although the listen-page may looks rather confusing at first sight due to the choice of colours and the abundance of symbols, you will see that in fact it is easy to navigate in, and that at the right hand side there is legend that explains it all.
To listen a radio, just click on the radio, and a window will pop up automatically with the player of your choice. There’s nothing more you need to do. At first, it will do a small buffering, and once that’s done, it will start playing. Practical: the track title will appear, and also the track titles of previous songs. So if you like the song, you know immediately what you’re looking for. Finally, if you like the radio, you can add it to your presets. I would sincerely recommend to do that, because there are really tons of radios!

-> BROADCAST <-
There is a personal and professional broadcasting feature. As you would expect, the personal broadcasting is for free, and for the professional version you have to pay. I haven’t tried broadcasting yet, but I’ll give a short overview of what you can do with personal broadcasting. There are three ways to broadcast:
a) “basic broadcast”: upload 365mb of your mp3s and broadcast 24 hours a day
b) “live broadcast”: live broadcasting from your computer, with possibility of live voice between songs and more
c) “relay broadcast”: people broadcasting from another site can have their radio station appear in the listing of Live365

-> COMMUNITY <-
This includes a chat channel, and a message board. Concerning the chat channel, it’s not very crowded, if you see what I mean. The message board on the other hand seems to used more frequently, but not that much too.

-> HELP <-
Extensive help feature. You can choose between a lot of different topics and sub-topics. Quite easy to find your answer.

APPRECIATION
---------------------
Onto the most important part: my personal appreciation.

- The quality of the music
Although you will still find a lot of crap, you can also find some very interesting radios. I believe the most important thing is the fact that you can listen to music that is normally not played on the radio. Now, at last, I can get to know some bands you don’t hear on the radio. Another interesting thing is the fact that you hear unknown songs by famous artists, instead of their hits. Music lovers, this is the place to be!
The latest additions to my presets: “All Ears Radio”, “The Ripper’s Vault” and “Ventura Higways Radio”.

- The quality of the sound
Live-stream music isn’t of course the best quality of music, due to the fact that it takes a lot of band width to send the music through. However, I can’t complain about the quality of the sound. It’s not as good as MP3s, but reasonable to listen to. What you should keep in mind is to always choose a radio with speed “T1/DSL”, because these radios have the best sound quality. The sound quality of a “33k” radio on the other hand is unsatisfactory. So when I’m looking for a new radio the first thing I do is sort the radios by speed, that way I get all the “T1/DSL” first.

- Use
Don’t be fooled by the sometimes overloaded lay-out, this site is quite easy to use. Even my mother can choose and play a radio… hmmmm… now I’m exaggerating! The only problem I have encountered until now is that the web site can sometimes be a little too slow.

- No talking
Most of the radios play ONLY music… so no silly talking between the songs! Moreover, songs are played entirely on most radios. In other words, on these radios you won’t hear some moron starting to talk during a fabulous solo by Mark Knopfler.

- Advertising
You saw this one coming. If it’s free they’ll have to get their money somewhere else. However, the advertising is not very present. There is just one small banner on top of the web site, and now and then a short sponsor message between the songs. I’d like to stress here that these messages are quite short and their frequency not high at all. The only thing that can be annoying is that they have an ugly American accent.

CRITICS
Yes, I’ve been too enthusiastic.. there is a major disadvantage. The most annoying one: it’s American. Awwww, that hurts… there aren’t a lot of European radios… what a shame! I can assure you that from the moment I hear of a similar European site, I’m changing!
Finally, a small critic to end with, because the radios are playing MP3s people have uploaded, it happens often that the name of the tracks are incomplete. If you want to download the song you’re hearing, and it appears to be “Track 08”, you wish the guy had named all his MP3s in a decent way!

OVERALL
-------------
Still, I can highly recommend this site to people who want to listen to something “different” music. If you like commercial music, don’t bother, you’re better off listening to a regular radio.