If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I have looked in the past at how you can order books from Romania, and have written about radio Costinesti, as well as about Toma Caragiu at Radio Romania International. Dar cum aceste articole mai vechi sunt in romana, probabil este mai corect sa discut scrierea articolelor in romana, mai precis despre un numar de telefon in Bucuresti, despre cum suni in USA sau Canada din Romania, sau despre cum vizionezi programe TV din Romania in afara tarii.
N-am scris pe larg despre posturi de radio romanesti in afara tarii fiindca ele pareau, atunci cand le-am cautat, usor de gasit in radio directories cum ar fi Shoutcast sau Icecast. Lately, I noticed that Shoutcast has gone proprietary and cannot be found in VLC, whereas Icecast seems OSS and can still be found; just not Impuls:
So what’s the point of this article?
First of all, a heads-up to Radio Impuls team that they’re not so easy to find. They do have apps you can download only for their own radio station, but that’s not useful to me. I am not going to download an app for a radio station I want to listen to, because I listen to many, sporadically, and am constantly running out of space on my smartphone. I have one app for online radio, TuneIn Pro, and if I cannot find it there, I’m not inclined to look for it further - I did here to help them and other Romanians, but I doubt most Romanians would go this far.
Now, when my friend told me about Impuls, she gave me the Bucharest frequency. I’m stubborn, and while searching online, I’ve discovered it’s a radio station from another city, Cluj, so Impuls listing in TuneIn has the original, Cluj frequency. I was thus able to find them in the search pictured above, but they could improve on it either by adding the Bucharest (biggest local market in Romania) frequency or something about Cluj or Romania that appears in the search results. While searching from my phone I’ve discovered that their website used WMV for their online streaming, which obviously doesn’t help 99% of smartphone listeners and most would, again, just give up upon seeing the “Windows Live” message.
Secondly, to help Romanians in finding their favorite radio stations on the Internet, here’s more search hits of Radio Impuls:
- Live Online Radio Impuls – multilingual, other countries as well
- Org.ro: Impuls – these guys list their Bucharest frequency as 88 (???)
- Streema: Impuls – lots of “what song / who played it” Qs without answer
- asculta-live Impuls – an obviously Romanian-only listing; they also list Bucharest frequency as 88
- delicast: Impuls – quite basic; International
- listenfmradios: Impuls – terrible Engrish blurb
- SoundCloud: djserginio – again, Bucharest is 88 and also his show is only 22:00 on Saturday, which is not when I’d be likely to hear my relative
At this point in time, seeing the different Bucharest frequency listed on all these directories I’ve decided to search for it, discovering thusly that it’s not Impuls but rather SmartFm. Luckily, this one’s also in the TuneIn directory:
Finally, it looks like it’s way easier to record the Internet stream than the FM stream, when it comes to scheduling, even if the location / proximity (necessary for FM) weren’t issues. My old tape-based stereo (from the 90s) allowed for scheduled recordings to tape, but I gave it to an ex-girlfriend long ago. It might be possible to schedule an FM recording on an Android smartphone, with Tasker, provided that it has FM capabilities AND Tasker can control it AND you have a sound recorder that can record the FM stream or the FM radio app has recording capabilities – of the ones I’ve seen, Moto and Acer do record while Asus does not. And you can also schedule the recording on a desktop or laptop in Linux or Windows and probably with a iOS device as well, though I don’t have much experience with the latter.
I might update this, time-permitting, with the recording or the experience of such. Or maybe not, since posting a recording of a radio show might get me into a copyright tug of war that's just not worth it.
So what’s the point of all this?
- Romanian radio is easy to find, listen to and record/timeshift, as long as you at least its frequency proper app.
- My friend is a corazon mentirosa. Don’t trust your friends to know the name of the radio station, as they are likely to just listen in the car and may confuse it with others; ask for the frequency and Google it yourself.
- Romanian radio stations should try to get listed on Icecast. Or they could stay happily carnati expirati.
Spor!
LE: I promised I was going to update on my efforts to record and, so far, I haven’t.I did make one attempt. First, I tested recording for a minute in the next five minutes, and it worked (a timer icon appeared in the top right corner of my Android screen). Secondly, as shown previously, I set the time for recording, leaving my phone on overnight while charging (not a good idea, generally –it’s best to charge while off).
And then, nothing happened.
When I checked the next morning, I did not find the recording I was expecting to find.
What happened?
One thing I tend to do every evening, before going to bed, is read a book. I don’t have time and space for paper books, so I use books I buy and download to my phone, and occasionally, books I borrow from the library. With the books I borrow, they often come a few at a time (there’s almost always a waiting list for the good ones). I seldom read them in the 21 days I get, so when they expire, I often cheat for a day or so by changing my phone’s date to the day before so I can finish them. When I’m done, I go straight to sleep, never setting the date back to reality. That’s what I did that evening, so the recording event had not been triggered.
And this is a good segue to this book.
Also: Audials, like TuneIn, but with Pro features in the free version.
Sources / More info: radio-impuls, TuneInPro, TuneInFree