With the advent of cheap and/or unlimited data plans, good coverage and the
increasing presence of Internet radio stations, the importance of listening
to streaming radio stations have become much bigger than ever. In this
Bible, I mostly elaborate on practices that

 1.. may make the sound quality much better using the same bandwidth,
and/or
 2.. may save you tens or hundreds of bucks a month by heavily reducing
data usage, while providing the same (or even better!) sound quality should
you not be able to access any unlimited data plan (Canada with its
ridiculous data rates comes into mind), and/or
 3.. may heavily increase your battery life by letting you "falling back"
to the much more battery-friendly 2.(7)5G Internet access technologies
instead of the power-hungry 3(.5)G ones, and/or
 4.. in cases, may even let you listen to some radio stations you would
never have thought of because of the network / operating system
restrictions, and/or
 5.. makes the central administration of your radio station favorites much
easier - no need to switch between different radio programs if there's a
difference between the protocols / formats they use.
This article is part of my "Multimedia Bible" series and will, eventually,
be incorporated in some way in the final version of Multimedia Bible, which,
hopefully, will be published this month. Note that I'll also elaborate on TV
(video) streaming and transcoding in a later Bible. We'll use many of the
tools / technologies introduced in this Bible in there; most importantly,
Orb and VLC.

...

more at:
http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=2399&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1