Like Altrok Radio On Your Computer? You'll Love It In Your Car...

This entry started out as a criticism of New York's K-Rock, on the air at WXRK-92.3 HD2, which you can get using an HD radio (there's one for $50 at Best Buy) but which, after a few days of pretty intense listening, is already starting to get a bit old. There's only so many times I can hear Silversun Pickups' "Panic Switch", and while Green Day are certainly a worthy band that's currently on a winning streak, they're pretty much played every hour.

But since that's about all I can say about that, the question becomes, well, what can you do to keep yourself entertained during, say, a long day at the office? My own preference would be to listen to Altrok Radio, but the workplace has a bit of a problem with streaming radio over the network. It tends to limit the bandwidth available for people to do things that are actually work-related. Those bloated Powerpoint presentations simply must get to their intended recipients!

So what to do? If your response is "listen to my iPod", well, we can work with that. The trick is to make it all automatic...and if there's one thing computers are good at, it's making things automatic.

So what has to happen?

• Get the station playing on your computer. You can use one of the links on this page to make that happen.
• Get something that'll record what your computer's playing. My choice for this in Windows is MP3DirectCut; it's actually meant for cutting MP3s apart and gluing them back together, but it can also be used to record whatever's playing on your computer to an MP3 file.
• Once you've saved an MP3 or two, get something that'll tag your MP3s so that your player will show you what you're listening to. Here's one, simply called "Tag", that works from the Windows command line. (Since MP3DirectCut has command-line interfaces, too, you can use Windows Task Scheduler to set your computer up to do things automatically.)
  
• Then drag your newly created and tagged MP3s into iTunes - or whatever you use to maintain your MP3 player's library - to listen to them.

So go get those two programs - the savvy among you will figure out how to use them with Wondows Task Scheduler and start recording Altrok Radio almost immediately. If that's not you, then sometime in the very near future we'll talk about how you can use them...