Streaming Radio Basics

Tues May 5th 2015 Instructor: Tyler Thompson Wyatt Fertig We’ll cover: • What is Streaming? • What is Stream Radio? • Paywalls • Pandora • Spotify • iHeartRadio • Freegal • SoundCloud, Mixcloud, bandcamp • mixlr

Introduction More music is available online than ever before, including old and hard to find recordings, as well as brand-new music.

Music online is totally free!

Here at EPL Streaming is a common Internet term which means that files are not being saved and kept on the computer; instead, videos and music are viewed (or streamed) from a website or application.

In order to stream you’ll only need:

• A computer or device (phone or tablet) • An active internet connection

What is Streaming Streaming radio is free music (similar to the radio) available on the Internet. Some services only let you pick the station or type of music, while others let you pick individual songs and playlists. Like a traditional radio station, these services are free because of the revenue generated from ads on the stations.

Most services, however, include Paywalls or upgradable accounts which users can subscribe to. In addition to all of the normal features, often paid accounts will remove ads, or allow users additional features. For each service we talk about today, we will also discuss the paid version and its included features.

What is Streaming Radio? The basics of PANDORA:

PANDORA is free personalized Internet radio that allows users to create and save “stations” based on music that you know and like. • Stations can be created based upon genre, artist, song, or even occasion.

Based upon the Music Genome Project

Pandora • What you need to create a new PANDORA account • A working email account • You will also need to create a password that you can remember, and supply PANDORA with your birth year, postal code, and gender. • Why does PANDORA require this personal information?

LIMITATIONS OF A FREE ACCOUNT • Limit of 6 “skips” per hour, per station (up to 24) • Advertisements UPGRADING TO PANDORA ONE… is also an option. For $4.99/month, users can listen free of advertisements and get additional skips.

You do not need to create a Pandora account to listen to music through them on your computer; however, creating an account will allow you to save your stations and song preferences for later.

Creating a New Account Creating a station is as simple as typing into the search box an artist, genre, or song that you are interested in listening to. From there, PANDORA will create a station based upon your entry that features music similar to that which you entered.

Creating A Station PANDORA has many stations pre-created for your convenience. By following the link, you can easily browse through them and find a station that’s right for you.

Finding Stations PANDORA has easy to use controls. • play/pause button • volume controls • skip button • thumbs up/thumbs down • Clicking "thumbs-up" tells Pandora "you like this track" and helps to bring in more tracks like it to your station. Clicking "thumbs down" tells us not to play this track.

Listening Unlike Pandora, Spotify is a music library of individually selected songs and artists and a downloadable application that requires an Internet connection to play music. (There is also a web player.)

In order to download Spotify, first you’ll need to make a Spotify account.

Feel free to follow along with the downloading process or just watch!

Spotify Part of the exciting or awful (depending on how you look at it) social features of Spotify is the ability to see other users you may be connected with through social media. Spotify suggests following Facebook friends with Spotify, which will give occasional updates on what your friends are listening to in the bottom right of the screen.

Spotify can also be allowed to post this information to Facebook as Facebook posts, but this is a feature that you have to opt-in to.

Social Features To download Spotify, Google “Spotify” or go to the url: https://www.spotify.com/us/

Then, sign up using your Facebook account or email address. If you would like to use Spotify’s social networking features, then signing up with Facebook is a good idea; otherwise, feel free to use your email account. 2 1

Downloading If you don’t feel like downloading Spotify, you can also find it available through a web browser; simply Google “Spotify Web Player” or enter the url: “https://play.spotify.com/” Almost all of Spotify’s features are the same, but with a different layout.

Web Player After Spotify is downloaded, it will be set as an Application located on the desktop and will start up automatically once the computer powers on.

To open Spotify, (if it isn’t already), double-click on the Spotify icon on the desktop. To listen to music, simply type in the name of the artist or song you are interested in. Each Spotify artist has their own page which includes their most popular songs and music organized by album; again, their library is extremely large, but not all encompassing. Listening When listening to a song or artist, you can add music to ‘your music’ by hitting the + symbol next to the artist name, the + symbol underneath the cover in the bottom left-hand corner, or the + symbol next to the song title in the middle. These songs will then be saved to my music and along the bottom left- hand side.

Listening To create a playlist, hit the “create new playlist” icon on the left-hand column or when listening to a song, right-click and select Add to -> And create a new playlist or add it to an existing playlist.

Playlists Not sure what to listen to? Or want music for the background? Try Spotify radio! Spotify radio is extremely similar to Pandora. Create new stations based on artist or track names.

Radio Spotify Premium Traditional radio stations have also banded together to provide online and phone access to radio stations. iHeart Radio service allows users to stream live radio and custom radio stations based on an artist or song.

iHeartRadio Search thousands of national radio stations by entering radio frequency or station names.

Find your Favorite Stations Clicking “Custom Radio” or entering an artist or song name in the search box will let you listen to radio based on the artist or listen to a few of their most popular songs.

Custom Radio Music service Library subscribes to which allows music mp3 downloads directly to your computer

Limited to 5 downloads and 3 hours of streaming per week

Must have a valid EPL card and know library PIN

Freegal Elmhurst patrons also have access to thousands of songs through freegal and our other music services, hoopla and Naxos Music Library.

To access freegal, go to our home page, select eLibrary -> eMusic -> and freegal on the following page.

Logging In Once in freegal, you will need to log in or create a new user. After that, search or select an artist and start downloading!

Listening Join us next time for:

Intermediate WordPress May 12th 7pm-8:30pm

Google Drive Basics May 13th 7pm-9pm

Conclusion