In order to measure how many people are going directly to the station's web site (rather than clicking the listen button), the Station home page now is a "redirect" that allows counting the number of people visiting a station. For radio stations without a schedule (those that are not News/Talk), this will help determine their relative popularity.

The FCC has changed some of the rules for radio stations, and as a result Low Power FM (LPFM) stations and translators are now included in the online database.

Low Power FM stations are FM stations licensed to serve a small service area and have a much less restrictive process for acquiring and maintaining a license.

AM radio stations are now permitted to simulcast their AM programming over FM translators.

While the focus of this directory is radio station, Digital TV stations now also appear in the station lists.

If you didn't notice it before now, you can use the favorites buttons to build up a list or favorite Shows and stations.
<= Favorite Shows List
<= Favorite Stations List

By building up a list of favorites, you can avoid loading the big pages of every show or every station.

The new features allow you to add a comment for each favorite station (the comment is only visible to you to remind you of something). The other new feature is that for your favorite shows list, it will now show Listen buttons for any station which is currently streaming that program.

Enjoy!

For those of you volunteers helping with testing, if you use the Station Check page to test the 6,000+ stations that don't have program schedules (mostly music stations), you will now be awarded points for doing that testing. As always, the points cannot be redeemed for cash or anything of value. :)

Please make sure the right station is streaming, and the station format is close to correct, and add a note if there is an issue that needs to be addressed. Note that many stations are a "simulcast" of another station, so just because the call sign is different doesn't mean it is the wrong station!

This political season is creating issues with the traditional idea that there are Conservative radio shows and there are liberal/progressive shows. A number of hosts who call themselves Conservatives are becoming virulent anti-Republican, calling openly for the defeat of John McCain. Their words mimic the Democratic talking points almost verbatim. At least until after the election, those programs assert something like "I'm not a Republican, I'm a registered independent", "We don't talk about left and right, we talk about right and wrong" are in a new category called Independent Politics.

Starting today, when a show is marked as having a guest host or a best of show, the show will sort below shows which have their normal host with a show created on the current day.

The web server is starting to experience performance problems during the first 5 minutes of each hour, especially during the first hour of the Rush Limbaugh Show. Each open browser is asking for the new list of what's on, even if the visitor is not at their computer. In order to reduce the load on the server, AutoRefresh will only be enabled now if you specifically ask for it in the preferences.

This is primarily an internal database issue, but since it probably will drastically affect the show rankings, here are the details.

If you want to Help with testing stations, PLEASE sign up as a volunteer and use the testing pages. The issue being addressed is that people are using the normal pages to "Test" and "Help", which is inflating the counts significantly. A few people may be "testing" every station on their favorite radio show to deliberately inflate the popularity of that show.

So now a "listen" will only count if you actually listen to the show on that station for a significant period of time.

This is still experimental and not available on all stations... but if you see this symbol next to the listen button, this opens a window with an embedded Windows Media Player control inside. This window will auto-close itself after 1 hour - so you can listen to a stream while you fall asleep and not have to be bothered by the stream all night.

On the todo list is to make it more customizable, and perhaps create a wake-up function that will begin playing the stream in the morning (of course limited by the computer still running, and the station stream being available).

Some United States broadcasters - especially Clear Channel Radio - are now blocking access to their streams for people connecting from outside of the United States - this especially seems to affect people in Canada. The claim is that this is due to legal issues over payment of royalties, but it may also be due to advertisers not being willing to pay to reach listeners who cannot buy their products. If you are trying to listen to a syndicated program, try to find another station not owned by Clear Channel. Another option is to wait until the Immigration Reform Bill passes and then come live in the United States.

If you were already a registered user and decided later to click the Volunteer page, there was no automatic way to take an existing account and make it into a volunteer account. That has been addressed - now if you are registered, you can become a volunteer by clicking one button. If you are already a volunteer and visit the volunteer page, you will get the links to the current pages used to help.

Over the past few weeks, some important database changes were made to speed up access and reduce load on the server. The ability to look at times other than the current time was removed to evaluate how well the changes were working and to avoid confusion over all the options. Several people wrote saying that this ability was very important to them, so the feature has been added back in. Please send an email if that broke anything.

As the number of stations streaming continues to grow, it's grown to the point that one person (me) cannot possibly verify every entry every 30 days. A change has been made that will suspend a schedule item if it has not verified by a volunteer within the past 60 days.

What this means that is programs will start to vanish from the directory if nobody has made an effort to keep the listing current. If people don't listen to NPR and Air America and tell the database that the stream still works, the listings will go away.

There are three ways you can keep your favorite programs alive: