Turn on, tune in at cyber-dial

By PETER SINCLAIR

Let's click round the cyber-dial and listen to the music.

Radio New Zealand: not a lot going on here, but I like the design of their Sound Archives and the snippets of news and sport you will find at Xtra Audio, where John Campbell enthuses at high speed and Kim Hill rattles away like a coiled serpent about to strike.

Wellington's Radio Active 89 FM is run by 96 DJs and volunteers. You can tell it is student radio because they are faintly apologetic about trying to sell you ads.

Also in the capital, The Breeze is a gentle memory of gustier Radio Windy. Part of the CanWest stable, it is one of the better sites with sounds you will find on the local web.

And let's drop in on one of Wellington's top brekkies. "The 91ZM Morning Crew are legends!" they boast, and judging by some of the archived clips I listened to, funny legends at that.

In contrast is "the first NZ internet radio programme to be broadcast to the web from New Zealand, founded in November 1995." Desperately messy, Kiwi Internet Radio makes you realise how times change.

Enough Kiwi music to satisfy a Labour bureaucrat can be heard at Palmerston North's Vision 100 - not streamed, admittedly, but you can listen to the current hour's programme.

I tune in to Mai FM a lot, because in radio you have to know what the kids are listening to. Their website is a bilingual exercise in DIY featuring antique animated GIF files.

The high altar of radio, the BBC, can still show most other sites how it is done. Radios 1-5, the World Service, a raft of local stations from Cumbria to Stoke, not forgetting ethnic offerings like the Asian Network, make this the ultimate online radio website.

Virgin, offering "10 great songs in a row," promises "new music." At the moment, Virgin considers it to be Madonna and Tom Jones. Apparently the Virgin enterprise makes a fortune from its online Ginger Shop.

The ratings of Rebel Radio, ceaselessly belting out good ol' music from "the lush, rolling hills of Planet Texas," will be an inspiration to local streamers like Steve Pulley. Surveys show KFAN-FM's live webcast has sent the small rural station's cumulative audience soaring to where it "exceeds that of many stations in large metropolitan areas."

My own personal pick has always been Monterey's down-home KPIG Radio, with its format-defying blend of country, Cajun, rock and blues. Who could resist a radio-station whose call-sign is "107-oink-5 on the dial"?

Lost and Found Sound is the kind of fossil radio we used to make ourselves in the dear, dead days before user-pays - a vast and idiosyncratic archive of the sounds of last century, including such gems as a pre-Second World War collection of bodily noises. The site won this year's Webby Award in the radio category (disclosure of interest: I was one of the judges and I liked it, okay?).

Or go to the Radio-Locator and listen to anything, anywhere, anytime - I did, and was practically entertained to death.

Links:

Radio New Zealand

RNZ Sound Archives

Xtra Audio

Radio Active

The Breeze

91ZM

Kiwi Internet Radio

Vision 100

Mai FM

BBC

Virgin Radio

Rebel Radio

KPIG Radio

Lost and Found Sound

Webby Awards

Radio-Locator