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Radio Presets

Speaking of radio, that music meme was going around recently and one of the questions was "How do you listen to music?" and I realized the answer for me is FM radio. I've gone through phases of cassettes and LPs and CDs and MP3s and streaming services, but it's always most consistently been broadcast radio, because broadcast radio just plain works with zero effort or decision-making required on my part.

(Even for long roadtrips, I like to see what quirky radio stations I can tune into instead of listening to music I brought, which unfortunately tends to work best when there is nobody else in the car to annoy with it.) Thirty years from now, we will all be listening to whatever thirteenth-generation media format is out there on our cyperpunk implants from our undergrounds bunkers, and I will still be listening to broadcast radio (because I guarantee there will still be broadcast radio.)

Anyway, here are my current radio presets. If you live in the DC/Baltimore metro area, these are mostly recs. If you don't, uh, this is me being smug about living in a place where I can pick up about a dozen noncommercial FM radio stations without trying very hard. :P Also most of them have internet livestreams I guess.

Noncommercial stations:

88.1 WYPR / Your NPR News Station : Basic public radio, NPR/PRI syndicated shows & some local politics/local interest talk + folk and avant-garde music in offpeak times. I grew up on this but have been listening to it a lot less lately as I have been getting less patient with media centrism. 88.1 is NPR talk in most of the US that I have travelled in. (Except within about 5 miles of many universities - it's also WMUC with student DJs in a small radius of College Park.)

88.5 WAMU / American University Radio: Similar to WYPR, often broadcasting the same content at the same time, but notable for being the home of The Big Broadcast which means if I'm out on a Sunday night I can just turn on the radio and listen to Dragnet or Johnny Dollar or Our Miss Brooks.

89.3 WPFW Jazz and Justice / Pacifica Radio: Non-NPR public radio, broadcasts the kind of jazz I'm usually not into (modern freeform stuff, although they also do old-fashioned folk jazz and blues sometimes, which I'm there for,) and the kind of justice I'm always into (leftist politics, racial justice, black empowerment, and hyperlocal politics.)

(88.9 WEAA / Morgan State University is similar, except with more mainstream music and some syndicated NPR content, and worse reception.)

90.1 WCSP C-SPAN Radio: Live, minimal-commentary coverage of Congress and other political events (including PMQs and protest rallies), commercial-free reruns of cable TV politics shows, and broadcasts of historically significant audio archives (like Supreme Court debates and presidential tapes.) I spent a LOT of high school listening to this while I was learning to drive and thus I react to the voice of Lyndon B. Johnson with the nostalgia other people my age have for Kurt Cobain. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

90.5 WKHS / Kent County High School Radio: When high school is in session, rural high school student DJs on student-run radio shows, mostly music and amazing PSAs which you can tell were created for school assignments; when high school is not in session, simulcasts WXPN, music-centric public radio from Philadelphia, including everything from super-obscure new indy stuff to 1930s era oldies (sometimes in the same show): in the late evenings, sometimes has amazing old (volunteer?) DJs who occasionally just go "it's really cold in here and I'm tired, so I'm signing off early to go home and take a nap" and then has an eight-minute song followed by dead air. The closest thing to NVCR I can get on local FM.

91.5 WBJC / Maryland's classical music station: All classical music, all the time! 90.9 WAMU is similar but I tend to like WBJC's selection better. (I still remember when I was a kid and I first encountered a book where a character was supposed to be shown to be snobby by wanting to listen to classical music tapes instead of the radio on a road trip and it had to be pointed out to me that most of the US does not have their choice of two all-classical noncommercial FM radio stations.)

Commercial:

103.5 WTOP / News Traffic Weather: This is not actually a rec, but you know you're from the DC area if the phrase "On the eights and when it breaks!" induces strong emotion in you. (99.1 WNEW wants to be WTOP for Baltimore and fails miserably, and anyway we all know that 99.1 is *supposed* to be WHFS so screw you, CBS.)

103.1 WRNR: the closest thing we have to what WHFS used to be, an actual independent music station! Mostly recent alternative/independent/local rock/pop, sometimes other music, very occasionally local Annapolis affairs.

102.7 WQSR / Jack FM : Mostly rock mixed music station, lots of oldies and classic rock mixed in with newer stuff, maximum music with no annoying DJs and long no-commercials sets, for when you just need music that you probably know the words to and nothing else.

100.3 WBIG / Big 100 : Oldies, which at this point is mostly stuff from the 80s and occasionally 90s, which *also* makes me feel very old, okay, oldies is supposed to be Elvis and the Big Bopper. (100.7 is the Baltimore oldies station, which has better and usually older music but worse reception.)

Bonus internet radio for when I want phone radio and I'm in a building that has wifi but FM reception is crap:

Third Rock Radio / America's Space Station, the streaming (mostly alt-rock) station available through the NASA app.

Do you still listen to radio? What are your go-to stations?

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Ahaha wow. In Vernon, we have two commercial radio stations and a public radio channel out of Kelowna (50ish km south) that broadcasts on its own frequency here, and anything else depends on where in town and what the weather is doing. Not that there aren't stations, but... mountains! And it's particularly dire for road-tripping!

...wait, that explains people's attachment here to Sirius Satellite Radio, doesn't it?

Edited to add: Also, this probably explains why it never occurs to me to listen to the radio. A long, sad history of not bothering because there was nothing available I wanted to hear!

Edited (addendum) 2018-03-27 00:20 (UTC)

Yeah, I've driven through parts of the US where it's pretty dire (and sometimes I still have to remind myself that WCSP isn't national), although at least along major highway routes you can usually get at minimum:
1 Christian talk station
1 Christian music station
1 top-40s station
2 country music stations
1 public radio station of *some* variety (although there's a stretch in PA where the public radio station seems to be mostly one guy reading off farm-related classified ads.)

...and at least two right-wing talk radio stations and one all-sports station on AM.

Do you get anything interesting in AM? We can once in awhile get a Canadian oldies station on AM here, iirc. (I usually stay away from AM though because it's so infested with right-wing talk radio.)

1 public radio station of *some* variety (although there's a stretch in PA where the public radio station seems to be mostly one guy reading off farm-related classified ads.)

oh man, I wonder if that's the same guy who memorably read off the lunch specials at a local restaurant at around 12:30 every day, although it's been so long, I don't even remember which part of PA that was in.

Maybe! That sounds about right. It was somewhere along US 220, 22 or 422 in the long stretch between losing NPR on 88.1 and picking up WIUP on 90.1 (and then Mongol Free Radio back on 88.1 in Slippery Rock.)

This is fascinating to me that radio could be so strongly your preference. I never listen to radio voluntarily, and if I could never listen to radio again in my life I would be DELIGHTED.

For me, I get earwormy songs stuck in my head too easily and then they drive me bonkers and I start hating the song, so if a radio station plays a song like that then it's just ruined the next several days for me. So I have a strong need to be able to skip any songs I don't want to be listening to. (and even then having personal control doesn't always work. Two nights ago I listened to a fun folk song I enjoyed that I'd never heard before, but it turned out that it was VERY earwormy and now the inside of my head has just been "I'm bound for Valparaiso in a rowboat" forever and I can't get away from it and I'm ready to murder the song even though I liked it at first)

Also I get embarrassment squick listening to people talking on the radio too easily: either interviewers for being bad at interviewing, or guests for just being awkward or embarrassing, and audio is not my preferred form of getting news anyway.

Are you regularly forced to listen to radio? Every so often I get stuck at the dentist's or somewhere where they have one of the rock stations with HORRIBLE djs constantly talking over the music, I don't think I could work in a place like that, especially the horror stories I hear about workplaces where they pipe in right-wing talk radio. :/

I am really bad at listening to interviews or call-in shows! So embarrassment squicky. The local DC politics shows often have really good interviewers and really amazing guests, and also they're about stuff like infrastructure planning that I am always there for, so I can sometimes sit through them (and I got a lot of my pre-internet sex ed from Loveline under the covers in high school), but even then I almost always have to flip away when the call-in parts start. (Luckily those are just about the only shows in that format that I get on these channels.)

I do not have as much of an earworm problem as you, wow! I can almost always knock out an earworm with another earworm, and if all else fails playing something catchy on the piano usually works, so at least I don't have to worry about something getting stuck for days.

I used to have a coworker who would quietly play the radio at her desk every day, that was juuuust loud enough for me to hear the melodies and it was the kind of mass-market-appeal pop stuff that is the most earwormy music in the world. There was one particular song where every time it came on I would be like WELL TIME FOR A TRIP TO THE BATHROOM because I just couldn't listen to it anymore. Thank goodness she left a couple months ago, and her replacement closes her office door if she wants to listen to music.

And for one awful summer I worked in a coffee shop full time and the radio was always on of course, and I hated a lot of things about that job but I think I might have hated the radio the most, oh my god.

Yeah, my earwormability is definitely not one of my favourite things about myself..... I can sometimes manage to kick an earworm out for at least the moment but it will often sneak back up on me when I'm least expecting it.

Ugh, yeah. I knew someone who had a roommate who listened to the same same playlist of twenty songs nonstop for months, without headphones, and for awhile she refused to even let people say the titles of those songs. (I sometimes wonder about people who don't seem to know that headphones are a thing! that exists! that are part of basic politeness in shared spaces!)

Wow, I would absolutely FLEE INTO THE NIGHT if I had to deal with a roommate like that, I would not be able to survive. I'm pretty clear these days to people I'm going to be living with that it's important to me to not hear whatever they're listening to unless they've checked with me first if it's okay.

Headphones are a wonderful invention that more people should make use of!

National Public Radio, but I've also got a community radio station (as opposed to State Public Radio which is how NPR happens) if I'm willing to turn the dial.

Oooh, what fun stuff does your community station do? Is it like Night Vale Community Radio?

All the DJs are volunteers so there is a wide mix of musical genres, political commentary and then a few syndicated news programs the station subscribes to.

Looking at the current line up, there's the standard mix of soul, in Spanish, punk, old time country, vinyl, antique music (aka before Classical Western) etc.

Cool! That sounds kind of like WXPN except with even more variety. I wish we had one like that local to here.

Oooh, Third Rock Radio sounds interesting - definitely going to check that out.

It's so interesting to hear about loving radio. I love the idea of radio and there are things that you can get there that are hard to find elsewhere, especially music I've never heard before, but by god, I just CANNOT with ads anymore. And DJs who go on for ages about their feelings about each song, like they're writing a recipe blog post. And just... people talking, ever, I suppose. Just give me music! I think my ideal radio station would be 'play song, tell me what you played, repeat.'

I do listen to internet radio that's not in English, since the people talking are generally less annoying when I can't understand what they're saying. :D I quite like Studio Brussel.

I suppose I should try podcasts, but trying to find ones that might even remotely be good is such a crapshoot that I lose patience quickly. Still, I should get back on the horse there.

I mean, I hate most of the goddamn DJs too. The XPN DJs are pretty tolerable because they tend to talk about the history behind the songs and the artists, not themselves, and focus mostly on the music, and the KHS one are tolerable because they are so clearly still learning and it's adorable, but luckily I can put together a good set of presets where the music stations mostly are just "play song, explain, repeat."

Are you thinking about music-based podcasts? I've gone looking for them and they're surprisingly hard to find - most of them, in fact, seem to have started as public radio shows. I have listened to a lot of Tapestry of the Times, which is folk music from around the world, and also a lot of Queer Music Heritage, but other than that I haven't had much luck, and a lot of what does come up in my podcast app seems to be not in English. Maybe music podcasters are kept off the main podcast search engines for some copyright reasons? They must be out there somewhere. Or maybe all the people who would be dj-ing music podcasts are just doing Spotify playlists instead.

Yes, music podcasts - but almost all of the ones I find are "let's pick three songs and examine them in minute detail as a roundtable" and I'm like... just play the fucking music!

I think you're right that a lot of what I theoretically want is moving to spotify playlists, which is disappointing because that reduces the available music to things that are more well known. And/or they're too specialized.

I did go and download a couple of possible podcasts last night after posting that comment, so thanks for inspiring me! We shall see if any of those pan out. But I'm going to look at Queer Music Heritage, too - that sounds awesome.

I read an article lately about pay-for-play corruption in Spotify playlists which was really interesting and opened a whole new world to me! (I have tried using Spotify too but the commercials get really annoying really fast.)

With QMH I did not always actually *like* the music, but it was always interesting!

I listened to the radio a lot in junior high and high school when I had no other choice, but now it is a last resort. I would just much rather listen to music of my choice.

I had a period when I did that a lot, but then I had a long string of my media drives crashing and losing easy access to my mp3 libraries and playlists (I still haven't really rebuilt since the last time, several years ago), and I got out of the habit, and now it usually just seems like way too much work to go to the trouble of maintaining the library against crashes and software/hardware changes, and then *also* having to do the work to choose the music every time.

Also, most of my music listening these days is on my commute, which is about ten-fifteen minutes, which is too short to feel like it's worth bothering with a CD or playlist or podcast, but too long for me to want to sit in silence, so: radio.

I don't bother with playlists. I just have all my five-starred songs on my phone and set it to random, so it's no work in that regard. My commute is really short, too, but I'd rather listen to one or two songs I like than be flipping through radio stations to find something I like (especially in the morning, when they're likely to be more morning show chatter than music anyway).

I used to think that someday I would have something that would play me all my favorite songs automatically, but I have never seemed to manage that. The automatic ratings couldn't tell the difference between "really likes this song", "listen to several times in quick succession because it was so boring she couldn't remember if she'd listened to it yet" and "was obsessed for two weeks because of a fandom and now doesn't care." Plus I have a lot of stuff I like but only in context, like Broadway soundtracks and holiday music, or only in a certain mood, like avant-gard electronica.

Every so often I would sit down and go "I am going to do manual ratings of everything" but then I would get distracted listening to stuff I couldn't remember if I liked or not, and never got very far. Or I would try to put together a playlist of just stuff I always like, but those do very badly at transferring between devices and software - for awhile I was playing mp3s on three different devices which all needed different ways of loading a playlist.

...and then the computer all the ratings and playlists were on died and I lost even that much progress. Maybe you have to use iTunes or the cloud for that to work? Or have more consistent taste than me.

Yeah, several computer changes ago I lost my iTunes library when I transferred stuff to the new computer. Files were all still there, but the library data was gone, so I lost all my play counts and ratings, and that's been years and years now...probably closer to ten than five, and I still haven't gone back and rated everything.

But even though iTunes has a five star rating, I don't really make use of that range, it's more like if I like it, I give it a five-star, and that's it. And one reason I don't really listen to a lot of new music anymore is that I have to actually focus on the music as I'm listening to determine whether I like it or not, and I don't have the time or energy for that, but I do have several thousand songs marked as favorites, so I just listen to those forever. XD

It sounds like we're in about the same place except I don't even have that several thousand marked anymore, so when I'm out of energy I just put on the radio. :D (I do have half a dozen favorite fanmixes on my phone, so if I want something I know for sure I'll like I put those on, but my phone only has the google music app which is shit, so the radio or a podcast is still usually easier.)

I listened to a ton of classical FM growing up, but barely have since then. Recently, though, for the nostalgia value, I've been listening to the pirated podcast of Schickele Mix, a 90's NPR radio show featuring eclectic mix of music with a lean towards classical/jazz, interspersed with music theory and dad jokes. (The host is a modern classical composer best known for his musical parodies under the pseudonym PDQ Bach.)

Ooh, literally half an hour before you posted this I was googling to see if Schickele Mix had a podcast, and then got as far as the official page that said there would never me one and gave up. I should have known someone was doing an unofficial one! I used to listen to that on-air, most of what I know about classical music I learned there.

88.9 FM, WERS, public radio from Emerson College, the only radio station what I have ever given money to and also the only one where I call in. Student DJs, mostly, occasionally entertainingly stoned; alternative rock from about 1970 onward plus new releases in alt hip-hop, R&B, and folk. Often whiter and more dude-focused music than I'd like, but they do switch to soul every night from 10 pm to 1 am, and play a deep-cut reggae song every afternoon at 4:20 for, as they put it, no particular reason. Every Saturday they do college a cappella groups which, depending on my mood, either makes me very happy or causes me to wince and leave fast. Caused me to buy the most recent New Pornographers album.

Also I do a thing, have done my entire life, which for some reason the people around me mostly don't do, and I don't understand why-- which is that I hit scan on the radio when WERS is not playing something I like, and I leave the radio on scan until something else occurs that I enjoy. Which can mean scan for a couple of hours, if it's a bad day for broadcasting. There have been a couple of really bad days where every single station has been sexism + racism bingo within the five seconds that scan takes and I have just turned the radio off in disgust, but most of the time it's like, half an hour of scan, run into a song I like on the mostly corporate alt-rock station, half an hour of scan, run into a song I like on the mostly-appalling "nostalgia" station, see if WERS has gotten over whatever means I wasn't there in the first place... I would enjoy this very slightly more if there were some way of skipping the sports-talk stations entirely, as around here they are unthinkably bro-y even in five-second increments, but other than that it works great.

I WAS JUST ABOUT TO COMMENT ABOUT WERS. :D Love them so much. The only bit they do that I don't like as much is their Out Of Context Broadway Songs bit and even that's only, like, two hours twice a week. Because of their general format (ie, not being top 40), I often do not really know who's high in the top 40 lately. When I am listening to top 40 and hear a song I've only ever heard on WERS, that's how I know someone's made it ;)

..what is Out Of Context Broadway Songs, and would I like it?

Possibly? It's a couple hours of them just playing random showtunes from various shows. There's no context to know the plot or who's singing, and I'm very bad with voices to begin with (you know Beethoven's Last Night? I'd always thought it was the same person doing Beethoven and Mephistopheles. It turns out it is not the same person.), so following along is hard or just impossible, since it assumes you know things that I don't know. Every so often it plays a song I'm familiar with, but for the most part, I delay kitchen-ing on Sunday until 2pm so I can get acapella instead.

EDIT: If you want to give it a shot, they have a couple of streaming options on their website, and I also listen on the iheartreadio app on my phone. Standing Room Only is 10-2 on Saturday, and noon to 2 on Sunday.

Edited 2018-03-27 22:27 (UTC)

Hmm, it sounds like maybe not. I only like out-of-context showtunes if they're supposed to be out of context (like the old ones that are designed as radio hits) or if they're from musicals I know (which stops at about 2002) or if they're very carefully put in the *wrong* context (I used to have a lot of fun piecing together songs from various musicals to make an entirely different musical, helped by the fact I can't tell voices apart either - I spent a long time not realizing Marius had *two* girlfriends in Les Mis) but that doesn't sound like what that is.

WERS sounds really cool! I wish I had a good station where I could get alt/local/old school hip-hop: the hip-hop stations here seem to only do the really commercial pop stuff. We don't really have any sports-talk on FM around here, except small segments on the news stations - that's all been pushed to AM, which is interesting.

...I will admit I can't leave the radio on scan, five seconds is not long enough for me to decide if I want to listen to something, so I have to manually scan, which someone tends to annoy onlookers even more?

Although I don't usually do that in my home area, I just skip through my presets, so when I'm scanning I'm usually trying to figure out *what* the station is while I'm at it. Fun car game!

I guarantee there will still be broadcast radio

Didn't Norway recently stop FM radio in favor of going only digital? I know the EU countries planned to phase out FM too, but that got scrapped because digital didn't get adopted nearly as much as they thought it would, though afaik the plan is still to turn off FM just like with analog TV.

Well, digital is still broadcast, just not analog. But you got me to look around - it looks like because of the way the US historically parcelled out frequencies, it's easier for us to do digital/analog simulcast on the same station, which is pretty widespread in the US right now - I think all of the stations I listed except WUCP, WKHS and WRNR currently do an IBOC digital/analog simulcast. It looks like in a lot of Europe they're moving to digital standards where they can't do analog alongside as easily.

Even if FM dies completely, though, I guarantee somebody will still be doing a pirate music broadcast on shortwave. Shortwave is unkillable.

*pours out a 40 for WHFS*

At this point pretty much the only radio I still listen to is Nats games on 106.7. For my sanity I had to stop listening to WAMU during my commute (the one time I've tried to turn it back on since I stopped, I got a story about genocide. NOPE.) and before that, I couldn't find a commercial radio station that interested me once WHFS bit it. I'm out in the VA suburbs and I don't think the Baltimore area stations have enough power to reach.

Yeah, you definitely couldn't get either WRNR or WKHS in Virginia, they're patchy even where I am, and those are the ones I'd want to suggest. :/ Probably not WBJC, either. You might like Pacifica, which you might be able to get, but it has a fairly high risk of people talking about how horrible the world is.

I was wondering why you were so tolerant of FM radio until I saw your list. We do not have that kind of range where I am. I am lucky to have Oregon Public Broadcasting and KBOO, an independent radio station that does its own quirky music'n'talk broadcasting. That's basically all that's worth listening to.

I am also pretty tolerant, tbf - there's a couple of basic Top 40 stations I put on sometimes (when I know they don't have any of their super-annoying DJs on, anyway) that are tolerable if I just want something with a beat, but aren't, like, good.

KBOO sounds like my kind of station!

A friend of mine introduced me to The Gamut: https://live.gamut.fm/listen/ Which they described as "Basically some public radio DJ's iPod on shuffle". Plays a little bit of literally everything.

Thanks for these recs! I don't have very good radio reception these days - I live in Havre de Grace, northeast of Baltimore, these days - but I hope I can pick up some of these. Especially WRNR; I grew up with WHFS. :)

I must confess it's been ages since I listened to local radio. I listen online to NPR news, Pandora, BBC Radio, and podcasts. This is my fun-browsing place:

http://radio.garden

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Radio Presets

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