Your guide to finding web radio on the road

I don’t know about you, but I always find the most irritating thing is finding some good radio stations to listen to when I’m traveling.  If you’re in a place with a good wireless connection and you have a laptop, you can hook in to one of the numerous radio stations that offer web-listening.

My absolute, hands-down favorite is CBC Radio 3, the Canadian web-and-Sirius-satellite-radio-only station that offers indy rock to the world.  They have great artists, comprehensive music lists, and regular podcasts that you can download to your .mp3 player and take away with you.  The DJs (can you still say DJ?) are also actually funny most of the time, so you don’t have to deal with irritatingly contrived conversations.  Also, if you’re somewhere warm, you can laugh at their descriptions of Canadian winters.  Radio 3 streams from a media player embedded in their website.

A-Net streams from the sub-Antarctic, and has some great folk/rock stuff.  It downloads itself as a .m3u file, or a streaming media playlist — if you have iTunes, iTunes will play it automatically.  RealAudio works if you don’t have iTunes.  It has no commercials or advertising, which I like *a lot*, and features mostly indy artists as well.  No big labels.  plus is streams from the Antarctic.  How cool is that?

There are also websites with listings of web radio stations by country, music style, call letters, and so on.  You can check this out easily at Web-Radio Directory.