Monkey Radio! – Grooving sexy beats …

It's back up!!!

Those that know me, know I have to spend a lot of time working on the computer, I am work in an office, usually on a website project or two... Anyhow, finding something chilled, easy to listen to online isn't easy... I hate to call it background music but essentially trippy jazz which you can work to (if your a designer and your work is influenced by what you listen to, you will be producing something elegant and curvacious listening to this) .

A few years back I found Monkey Radio – I think the guy behind it was working on one of the earlier versions of Winamp which used to be my mp3 player of choice, although more recently I am using either iTunes (I hate apple, but the shared music library is cool) or Windows media player, although its on my list to discover a better more usable mp3 player, but after disagreements with the RIAA and the extorionate rates they wanted (these are the same people who go after students who have downloaded a bit of music).

Incidentally at Mixit TV we don't have an official positin on pirated music, but we do strongly believe in supporting music, whether this requires DRM, other constraints and archaic laws is always up for debate! please feel free to discuss that one in the forums!

Anyhow, if you want to take a listen to monkey radio, and tell us what you think – the url is http://www.monkeyradio.org/ but you will need Winamp or ITunes to get listen to it …

Course, if you want to find more un-discovered music, you need to check back here soon – (hint at a coming soon on Mixit TV? )!!

Broadband rip off ?

I was just chatting to a friend about this whole broadband rip off - and he asked the question - so what ? Well the truth is that today it doesn't really effect 80% of us, but it might be that your one of the few it does.

If your paying for 8mb or above, you should be able to watch HD TV streamed over the web to your PC (which in turn can be connected to your HD TV) companies like BBC, DivX are all working on making this possible - however if your 8mb is really only 2 or 3 mb then you can't watch it without severe buffering (it pausing to download the next chunk) or it having to be in lower quality.

"...The typical Internet connection is 2 to 3 megabits per second, says Laszlo. The minimum needed to stream HD-quality video is 5Mbps. Laszlo added that even if bandwidth were to be increased, computers with lower graphics processing power may be unable to display the richer details that HD provides. ..." - full article

Point is that for music - you don't need much more than 2mb for reasonable quality, unfortunarely its proved those of you paying for that aren't getting even that ...

Unfortunately in this case you don't get what you paid for people paying for 8 often get less than 4 ... you can stamp your feet but there is very little they can do about it - and frankly when ever I have bought broadband I have known I am not going to get it ... it depends on many factors including where you live (how far from the exchange etc... ) but shouldn't your ISP, before you buy it, before you expect high quality HD to be streamed over your unlimited (by the way, its not always unlimited) connection ... shouldn't your ISP should tell you the truth?