toothpaste said:
I bought my ipod to get away from the poor programming on the radio. The commercials, the repeating songs, the annoying radio personalities. Damn, I want to listen to what I want to listen to not what some programming director thinks I want to hear.
AM/FM radio is living on borrowed time.
I haven't actively listened to the radio since
Z Rock went off the air in my area about twelve years ago. Since then I've been thoroughly unimpressed with any of the local stations around here.
Now, thanks to scads of storage space afforded by the iPod, combined with a decade and more of CD purchases (and Code Monkey's smartlists), I'm able to create a personalized mix that sounds very much like what I used to hear on the radio, back when I used to like what I heard on the radio.
Talk radio, I suppose, is a different animal entirely, but as was stated previously there are numerous podcasts available covering all sorts of subjects.
If you really,
really, need to listen to live broadcasts, then there are units like
this one [Edit: Damn, that thing might be bigger than my nano!] that sell for less than $15. The iPod does not, and likely never will, have an integrated radio receiver. Complaining about that is like (imagine it's ten years ago) buying a 5-disc CD changer and complaining that it doesn't play LPs or cassette tapes. You want a tape deck? Don't buy a CD changer. You want a radio? You see where this is going.
The last music player I ever owned which had an integrated radio was my Sony Walkman, back when they still played cassette tapes (the CD players were called "Discman" [discmans? discmen?] at the time). Even most walkman-style CD players these days don't have radio receivers. Granted, there are a few that do, but most of them (that I've seen) do not.
Sorry if that was off-topic. I started a reply and began to rant. Apologies all around. I guess my point was to agree with toothpaste that radio is swiftly becoming a thing of the past.