Chinese Online Radio

Julie, I agree with you...it's really hard finding good "alternative" music in China (online, at least). Dragon Radio is a decent source of more alternative music from Asia: Dragon Radio It's not specific to Chinese music...pretty much includes all of Asia. And it's not really a great source for learning Mandarin, since the host speaks in English. Nonetheless, you can subscribe to the podcast and every now and then find some decent alternative music from Asia.

Go to 'Latest News' and click on any news item. There is the text and then there is a link to the mp3 file with the spoken version of the same text (not word for word but 98% close).

furyougaijin ---)

Can't seem to locate those transcripts. Where are they?

Cheers

@fudawei: Indeed there is, my fault for completely misreading the toolbar page. That'll teach me not to skim read a page and then make comments online :)

@excuter: VLC is indeed the best media player around. If you are using it on a mac it even works with the apple remote.

@julesong: Please let us know if you find something. My Chinese isn't quite up to the level of searching Baidu and actually understanding the results yet.

I'm hoping to find a radio station that streams music that's... well, different. Not pop, not "all classics," not easy listening... a sort of alternative music station. I can't imagine that all the music over there is either pop or easy listening or classic or ancient. Is there an equivalent of American folk (21 century and current), blues, or a blending of Asian and country western? There's got to be an alternative music movement over there, especially, perhaps, at the universities?

Excuter, thanks for the VLC link! Nice program...definitely seems to buffer much better than Windows Media and Real Audio.

@fudawei

:-))) And I'm yet to learn to care about the political bias of my study material. I find good quality audio that plays on MacOS - and I'm happy. I find that it comes with full transcripts - I say 'wow'!!! My pleasures are simple...

Yet, as I've mentioned, if you know similarly useful sources without a political bias (is that even possible?, I will be a grateful recipient of that info...

... just install it and add the link from the right side of the radiolist (from the homepage...) to VLC´s Playlist. ^_^

for those not wanting the toolbar for whatever reason...I recommend the VLC mediaplayer!

I love it and it´s for free. It is downloadable for Windos (hehe...), for many Unixversions and for Mac as well.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

furyougaijin ... we've learned that it is best to leave politics to the politicians and diplomats.

Not sure if this is included in the mysterious bar but:

...www.rfa.org is the BEST Mandarin-language radio I have been able to locate so far.

The reason being that their news broadcasts come with FULL TRANSCRIPTS.

If any other radio station is offering something similar, I would be very interested to know.

billgloveruk ... isn't there an Apple-flavored version of Firefox?

clay ... as mentioned earlier, there are lots of dead links in the tool-bar. It was put together before the latest restructuring of the CPOD website, so it refers to things long gone (the Wiki, the Weekend Show, etc.) I think I could clean it up pretty quickly, but I need to shake off this winter weather first.

We could, in theory, do one up for SPOD as well, btw.

I now feel like I'm missing out... :(

fudawei,

i just downloaded the tool bar as well. Nice work dude.

henning ... As I mentioned, I haven't really had much time to examine it in depth lately (although I still use the radio regularly), but I intend to do a comprehensive update in the coming weeks. I even toyed with the idea of forming an 88group for that end. I'll see which components can be tossed and which should be kept.

Oh wow, and yes, the radio portion does work! Finally, I get to hear Chinese radio! Thank you so much!

FDW,

the Toolbar was indeed my preferred access point to Chinese radio broadcasts (and formerly also to the Forum) and I think it is great.

Nevertheless I recently de-installed it because it slowed my Firefox down by magnitudes. Whenever you open a new window, the Media player initializes and all channels are updated. One accidental click on a piece of vocab in a CPod dialogue and Firefox is paralized for at last 30 seconds.

As the Forum activites have cooled off, this downside outweighs the benefits of the toolbar.

Hey, cool! That's a really neat tool bar! More CP users should know about it! :)

Never mind - I think I've got it now. :) I now return you to the regularly scheduled program...

I don't know what to tell you. I just installed it on a browser here at work. Took 4 seconds.

fudawei - I tried to get the toolbar, but clicking on the download link keeps giving me "service unavailable" :(

@fudawei: A CPod toolbar sounds like a great idea, but unfortunately I'm a Mac user so no IE 5.0+ for me. I've also been unable to reset my password or sign up with a new account on the forum so haven't paid much attention to it of late. :(

I'll be sure to keep an eye out for future toolbar developments though.

Let's cut through this ... Get the CPOD-Forum Toolbar for your browser. We've already configured a hefty selection of great Mandarin radio stations. ===== nb: The Toolbar is something me and Bazza put together. It has fallen into neglect, but still works fine for the most part. There are a few outdated links and a bunch of new stuff that could be added. In short, it's in need of a general tweaking -- but the radio part should work just as fine as ever. I was toying with the idea of putting a group together in a few weeks to do a quick and systematic update. I'll post more on that later.

I haven't been able to get any of those stations working on my computer. :( Anybody else had better luck?

no Problem ^_

I think I'd have to have seen the post... :P

Thanks for the link.

(hmm...was that rude?...)

Well,well,well...OK I will be so kind to post Calkins link from Hennings post where he informs us how much of the radioprogram he understood. ;-)

http://www.multilingualbooks.com/online-radio-chinese.html