I still remain a fan of SomaFM, a network of awesome streaming music.

Two interesting things I’ve come across, though:

The first is AACPlus. The webpage makes it look like a minor little project. But it’s being used by a number of streaming stations, and it’s supported by VLC and WinAmp, among others. What makes it notable is that I’m listening to a 48 kbps stream of one of Soma’s stations right now… And it sounds better than a 128 kbps stream. You can apparently drop it to 32 kbps and drop to just slightly less than CD quality, and at 24 kbps it’s still on par with MP3 streams. It works out great: it delivers high-quality audio to me, and instantly doubles (at least) the number of listeners they can handle, since bandwidth is almost always the “limiting reactant” with streaming audio.

In other news, the RIAA is apparently having luck getting Congress to raise webcasting rates enormously again… In some instances they’ll apparently go up by more than 1,000%. If you check out the Soma site, they’re coming up short on funding every month, pleading for donations to stay online. This is the case with a lot of streaming radio sites, too. They’re barely staying online as it is. Raising their rates by a factor of ten is going to kill Internet radio.