I have been a Shortwave listener for years. I was given a radio by a friend of my parents that received shortwave when I was about 7 years old. I have owned many since then, becoming a collector.
The hobby has been slowly dying out in the modern age. Modern technology has caused many of the shortwave broadcasters to reduce or even eliminate their world services, and the utility stations (government and commercial) have been replaced by Internet and digital satellite based services. I kept a few radios though ,and still turned them on and listened once in awhile. Until I found this program that is.
Net radio is fun. You can find many of the world-wide outlets that are gone from shortwave on the net. The problem has been formats, and directories. Too many different places to look and you need three or four players to listen. Some of the stations even force you to listen with a browser-based player only.
Screamer Radio is a nice little program that plays almost any streaming format internally, and has a nice self-updating directory with over 5000 entries! The directory and favorites list are in XML format, allowing customization. You can add custom stations easily. There is also a record function that works very well, and support for Winamp plug ins in the newest beta version.
As a small aside, there is a video equivalent of screamer that I have found. Not as polished, but also very interesting. It's called JLC's Internet TV. Same idea applied to Internet TV.
Download Screamer Radio Here
Download JLC's Internet TV Here
