Listening to "Internet" classical music

A few weeks back I received email from someone on the KVOD staff. She had found my web site which catalogs KVOD's and other classical FM radio playlists and said she liked my site. She asked if I could get KVOD after they switched to a newer, much weaker frequency. I told her No, KVOD was too weak and that I had given up on trying to listen to it either at home or in the car. Try new stuff she suggested. Spend $350 and get a Squeezebox to hear Internet Radio! Try an HD Radio, after I buy a new one for each of my rooms where I have radios. She reminded me of George Bush after 9/11 telling us to go out and spend!

Using the internet to listen to classical music is possible, but it's a bit of a weak soup. Sure I can listen to KVOD on any of my computers, but why would I do that? The Internet makes available stations from around the world, so why listen to cow-town Denver? I've tracked their broadcasts for years and they prefer broadcasting predictable "popular" easy-listening music, almost always short. They've shrunk their broadcasts of contemporary classics and really push the pap.

So given that I have a world-wide choice of internet classical music, what's the problem? Connectivity, in a word. I'm a Comcast subscriber and have been for many years. They are okay, but while listening to internet music, I get frequent breaks in the music. It just stops for a while, then comes back. It really adds to the music, inserting 'rests' where the composer forgot to write them. ;)

I use SSH to connect to my server to maintain my web sites. All too often I'm in the middle of a session and my keystrokes stop. A high percentage of the time I'm just thrown off and I have to start all over again. I've been noticing this for years with SSH so I wrote a little perl program to ping my external router, the one that my Comcast-supplied modem is connected to. My techie friends tell me that I should always be able to ping my router and that it should always be there. Such is not my case. I've seen it go away for fairly lengthy periods of time, with the blinking lights on the modem confirming what my computer tells me. At other times it just comes and goes. In the last 10 minutes or so, 78% of the pings got through fine, and the rest of the time I had between a 20% and 100% packet loss. Fortunately I can listen to my own mp3 library and avoid these unexpected 'rests' in the music.