It is on xm on channel 164
At least we never had commercials on our music stations. Although I have to admit that on the few occasions I’ve found a channel I like and listened to it for any length of time, I’ve noticed that they’re no better than terrestrial radio in that they have 30 or 40 songs that they play over, and over, and over. And over.
But 95% of my Sirius listening is Howard Stern anyway so they could delete all the music channels and when I finally noticed I probably wouldn’t do much beyond shrug.
Is it really asking too much for XM to publish a descriptive channel listing?
True, but XM had gotten rid of the commercials by the time I subscribed in May 2004. Now I’m seriously considering getting rid of it entirely at the end of the year.
Apparently the decade stations (Big 80s, now 80s on 8; etc.) are the only place where Sirius users lost out. While I run my errands on Saturday mornings I’ve gotten in the habit of listening to Nina Blackwood re-countdown a top-40 list from the 80s. Interspersed with the 80s music you’d get modern commentary about bands that were still touring, and notes about career transitions that nobody could have known about at the time.
Yesterday? I got a 20-year-old replay of Rick Motherfucking Dees, offering a Super VHS VCR and $200 to a random winner who could identify Bill Murray’s voice. Is this kind of shit what XM users had to put up with?
All in all, music quality seems to have gone downhill somewhat since the switchover. I’m still subscribed till next summer, so maybe things will even out, or at least stop sucking, soon.
Fred is now 1st Wave, and is pretty decent. Lucy and Ethel are called Lithium and Alt nation or something and are both significantly worse. I hope you like Blink 182 and Barenaked ladies!:smack:
The Boneyard is gone.
Not only do I get to lose half the FX channels I liked but I get to listen to Directv customers scream about losing them all day long.
It was an insult when XM replaced Fungus with 24-7 AC/DC. Now I guess Fungus is gone forever. And I have to pay extra to get NFL games? I’m rapidly losing interest in satellite radio.
I’m perma-set to Book Radio now unless I want the news.
Or it’s the weekend, when apparently nobody wants to listen to an audiobook and wants football instead. :rolleyes:
The channel merge happened to strike on the day I was driving to Austin. So, I had 6+ hours in the car to check out all the new oddness.
It’s too bad that they ditched the more interesting channel names for bland yet descriptive titles like “80s on 8, 50s on 5” and such. But whoa, now there’s a “40s on 4”? I didn’t know there was much of a market for music from the 40s. Oh well, should be interesting.
They didn’t touch 1st Wave or Lithium, which is good. Super Shuffle is apparently gone, bummer. Book Radio is a darned interesting channel; when I first discovered it, they were playing an episode of “Imagination Theater”, a modern radio-drama series styled after the anthologies of the early 20th century. I’ve lost my recordings of IT, so it’s good to hear it again. Radio Classics, also, seems intact, which is good, because Fibber McGee and Molly have seen me through many a boring lunch hour.
And finally, my biggest complaint: the channel I listen to the most, Raw Dog, has changed slightly. Now, they have Sonny Fox on for six freakin’ hours in the morning. He has nothing to say except what’s “coming up”, his voice is either dull or grating, can’t decide, and he takes precious time away from the uncensored standup comedy I love. GRAH!
The new Ethel blows. Every time I turn it on, some jackass DJ is talking over the music! If I wanted that, I’d listen to terrestrial radio.
The new Lucy was blah, but the new Fred was listenable, at least.
I like the new 40’s on 4 station, but I’m so bummed that Punk and Backspin are gone. I liked Super Shuffle, too.
Will have to check out Book Radio, that sounds interesting!
The Boneyard is now Hair Nation, I think. Or is that a ported Sirius station? Either way, I had Boneyard as a preset and my radio automatically switched the preset to HN.
Sounds pretty much the same either way, although it seems to be a bit more glam and a bit less metal.
If they’d play Pantera and Metallica and other metally metal on Liquid Metal instead of all that cookie monster shit I’d be delighted.
Our opinion differs from Drain Bead about unFred. We’ve had XM for 3 years now and listened to Fred most of the time. I flip around the dial more than my wife, but it usually stayed on Fred, Lucy or Ethel.
1st Wave is a pale imitation of the variety that Fred used to display. I took a look at their playlist the first day and found 3 instances of the same band played 10 times in 18 hours! They simply play FM radio from 1988 over and over and over again. The beauty of Fred was the depth and variety of music that they played. I can’t believe that they have 15-20 years of music to choose from, and they only play the top 10 songs from 1980-1987? It seems like it is 80’s on 8 without Whitney Houston and Def Leppard.
The changeover has made us question the value of the subscription to us. We have a bigger playlist simply using our CD collection ripped to MP3 (as opposed to trying to build our own MP3 Fred playlist). Doing a little digging on the web should allow us to grab a decent enough list of music to replace the poor programming.
Also, the display on our XM hardware doesn’t display consistenly after the change. I don’t know if is a problem with Sirius hardware as well, or just the signal conversion to XM, but it is annoying.
I have been a Sirius subscriber for about 3 years, Since the merger the quality of programing sucks. I have been a Alt Nation fan, but I may have to start looking for a new station. It seems both XM and Sirius subscribers are getting the shaft.
Six channels of NHL play-by-play intact…all’s well here.
Gotta side with the gripers here. Originally a Sirius subscriber, I looked forward to the merging of the music channels. I expected to keep the show formats of Sirius (since they bought XM, I think of them as the boss), but increase the playlist depth that XM had.
Instead, it appears we kept the playlist depth of Sirius and got douchebag DJs from XM to replace program formats.
What a disaster.
Thank god they left BBC One alone.
I suppose it’s better than XM and/or Sirius going out of business.
Only because it’s not in their power to fuck it up. Though I have to admit, I only ever really listen to the radio on the drive to work, so I wind up getting Radio One’s timeshifted morning show.
British DJs are every bit as inane and annoying as their American counterparts.
There was no way they were going to pull this off without pissing off some subscribers. Even if you hate the new lineup, it’s still a bazillion times better than FM.
My gripe is that on all three of our Sirius radios, one in each car and one in the house, the quality of the sound has suffered ever since they crammed in all the Best Of XM crap. It sounds like low quality internet streaming. Is the same true with XM radios?