I recently got a smart phone, and have become acquainted with Shoutcast, which apparently is the sole remaining justification for AOL’s existence. And it’s a damn good one, because it gives you access to a wide variety of free radio programming, from all over the world. Mostly it’s music, and you can get just about any kind of music you want at any time. Apart from Shoutcast I have been able to find a very few RTSP streaming sources, here and there. They tend to be very hard to find as even Googling is more likely to point you to discussions, complaints, and queries like this one, rather than how to easily find an RTSP broadcaster that plays this or that format in such and such language. What RTSP sources I have found, like Shoutcast, are overwhelmingly just music. The one exception to all this that I have found is KCRW out of Santa Monica, a publicly supported station that plays mostly locally programmed independent and alternative music in the evenings and on the weekends, and NPR news and talk during the day. To provide an idea of what this station is like, here is their website, and here is the Shoutcast link.
What I’d like to find is a German station available in this format, and whose programming consists at least partially of current affairs, politics, and the like. I presume that if there is such a thing as “talk radio” in Germany, it probably isn’t very similar to what that term has come to connote in America, so I’d be willing to give it a listen. I don’t have any particular urgent reason for wanting this, other than that I’d like to brush up on my ability to understand spoken German. That, and I just happen to be interested in the country so I like to keep up with the news.
One thing I’ve noticed is that, when I use my computer to go online and browse some of the large German broadcasters like NDR and ZDF, I notice that there, too, the radio offering are just about all music. Discussion and interview format shows seem to be slightly more popular there than in this country, but this is on television. This leads me to wonder if non-music radio still exists at all in Germany.
Thirty seven views so far. I know we have only a limited number of members who possibly could answer my OP, so I wasn’t expecting to see a lot of activity here. But since yesterday I learned a very useful piece of information related to this subject. I didn’t know it, but it turns out that I can download and listen to podcasts on this phone, and being able to listen to podcasts increases the options of what I can listen to enormously.
True, a podcast download isn’t the same as real time streaming, but, given the time difference between California and Germany, that’s probably a good thing anyway. So I’m good!
Very roughly, there are these categories of radio stations in Germany:
[ul]
[li]public, international audience: Deutsche Welle - programmes only partly in German.[/li][li]public, nationwide: Deutschlandradio (sitemap page - live streams are listed in the Audio section there) with the programmes Deutschlandfunk (current affairs and arts), Deutschlandradio Kultur (arts) and DRadio Wissen (for those who want to broaden their education)[/li][li]public, regional (affiliated with one or more of the federal states) - google the following nine Landesrundfunkanstalten: Bayerischer Rundfunk, Hessischer Rundfunk, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Radio Bremen, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, Saarländischer Rundfunk, Südwestrundfunk, Westdeutscher Rundfunk[/li][li]private, usually regional[/li][/ul]
The first three of these categories are probably what you should look at - the private stations either quasi-continuously play music, with only short news, or they are very much local news stations (there is almost no such thing as local TV news in Germany, just statewide or nationwide TV news programmes)
The three Deutschlandradio programmes I mentioned above. As for the Landesrundfunkanstalten, they usually produce several programmes differentiated on the following lines:
[ul]
[li]regional news/music programmes for particular states[/li][li]pop music programmes (basically the same as the private stations)[/li][li]classical music and arts[/li][li]informational [/li][/ul]
I appreciate the tips so far. Meanwhile I’ve found that RadioBremen/Nordwest has a lot of podcasts, and I can even stream the live broadcast. I’ve been able to hear news broadcasts, but their usual format seems to be that they play one middle-of-the-road pop song, and then have a few minutes of news or interview programming, followed by another pop song. The style of music and singing seems unchanged from when I was there in the 1970s. I know there must be many German stations that play hipper music, but I do want to find something more informational, since verbal content is what allows me to practice my understanding of German. The informational channel of Deutschlandradio sounds like it would meet my needs.
I still do have to struggle sometimes, in understanding spoken German. It often depends on the style and vocal qualities of the announcer. Not surprisingly, German spoken by academics often seems nearly as clear as English, since much of the German I heard and read back in the day was that of professors. By contrast, with the dialog in a sound-play or dramatic TV show I often have to replay parts of it, in order to compensate for parts where the actors are speaking off-hand or sotto-voce. On the other hand, with informational programming, it’s always pleasantly startling when they have to translate for someone speaking a third language. If it’s one of the languages that are related to English and German, like Swedish or Dutch, I can’t help trying to understand at least some of what the person is saying. (At a point during my misspent education I did learn some Icelandic.) I usually fail to understand a word of it, but the pleasantly startling aspect of it is when the German translation comes on, and I totally understand it.
I just tried the informational channel and am now listening to the cultural. I happen to be on my laptop right now but they also work on my smartphone. Perfect! Just what I needed, thank you very much.
I do most of my German language maintenance by watching/listening to German news podcasts and by watching various shows online.
I listen to or watch Tagesschau, Tagesthemen or Nachtmagazin several times a week. Here’s their podcast page.
I also make my way through quite a few shows every week in ZDF’s Mediathek. I usually just go to the Sendung verpasst? page and see what’s appealing. There are a disproportionate number of cop shows available, but they tend to be interesting from a language perspective because they’re set in all different regions (check out Tuesday/Rosenheim Cops and Thursday/Notruf Hafenkante to see the extremes). They’re pretty cheesy, but you get to hear a fair amount of everyday vocabulary along with the cop lingo.
There are a few shows that aren’t available online outside of Germany, but I’ve found more than enough to keep entertained and to bring my German back up to reasonable fluency. (I’ve never really had problems understanding, but my vocabulary was getting really crappy for a while; I don’t speak German a whole lot at the moment, but when I have to I’m not struggling to find words anymore.) ARD has similar online offerings (and, looking just now, they seem to have redesigned their Mediathek to make it more user-friendly), but I find ZDF the easiest to navigate.
For variety of guests and ease of understanding, you might want to try watching Reinhold Beckmann. His guests run the gamut from politicians to entertainers. (The current show - from June - includes interviews with the national team’s former goalie, a priest who is working with AIDS patients in South Africa, and one of the developers of the Pill.) His show is much more lightweight than some of the other talk shows; I find it easier to understand because you don’t need as much political and cultural background to follow everything.
On preview I see you’ve found a lot of what you’re looking for, but I’m still posting information in case you’re interested. And I’m off to check out some of the links that Mops shared…
As for TV I’ve been enjoying ZDF.de for quite some time. Probably for copyright reasons, the majority of available full-length content in their Mediathek is documentary or reality based content, rather than fictional programs and films. Even so you can find and watch the German version of typical TV fare such as cop shows and office dramas. In this, German broadcasters are tremendously more generous in what they offer on their websites, than American ones.
Now I’m completely hosed. I restored my unit to factory condition–why? Because it kept telling me there wasn’t room to download podcasts.
So I’ve lost my GSPlayer, which I’ve reinstalled, but can’t configure the PLS converter that I used to have–so no Shoutcast, no podcasts, no foreign radio, or any radio at all besides what my feeble headset-wire-antenna will pick up.
I paid a little to get Streams-T, but except for one Canadian TV show in English, it hasn’t worked for anything.
I think it’s best if my HTC and I spend some time apart…
Deutschlandradio has turned out to be excellent. The “Wissen” and “Kultur” channels have features that are interesting, with musical interludes that are a lot more progressive and interesting than the bland pop music I was alluding to above.