Reviews – Page 132

Wondering what Internet radio is? Well, you have normal radio on airwaves, Internet radio is just it’s counterpart in cyberspace. The music is ‘streamed’ to you, that is, in small packets which allow instant play. Hooray, no waiting for slow downloads from P2P networks. The second advantage is, that it’s COMPLETELY legal, so no sleepless nights thinking that fearing that RIAA will slap a violation-of-DRM case on you tell you to pay thousands of bucks.

Requirements for different providers are different. And different formats may be used to stream the music, like mp3, Real Audio streaming, WindowsMedia streaming, and sometimes even more obscure ones like Ogg Vorbis (which is the open-source alternative to mp3; don’t panic Winamp and Real Player can easily play this). In the time when dinosaurs ruled, Real Audio was the preferred format, but post-Microsoft, many have shifted to MP3 or Windows Media. Also, some allow you to simply play, by just going to a site and tuning in, others require users to download special software. Some use external software, but leave it up to you to choose which one. Then again, some allow you to create your own customized station by allowing you rate songs, artists and albums; others have fixed stations which you can listen too.

Now I’ve been using Internet radio for quite some time, and I feel that Yahoo! Music LAUNCHcast is THE BEST service, because of the fact that it has one of the largest collections, and run special features like Y! Music Live, Dig it or Dis it (visit the site to know what I mean), videos. It also allows anyone with a Yahoo! ID to setup their own customized station. I tried to find out about similar services and spent the whole day trying out new Internet services, all for mine (and your) benefit. Since I’m a freebie-loving guy, I’ll only include the free services. Note that some of them have free, as well as paid services. The drawback about free service is that it is generally ad-supported, but I don’t mind being interrupted once in while, it provides the ideal opportunity to go to the loo if you have to. I’ve already talked about Yahoo!, so now on with the rest. Also, I’ll omit the ones which don’t offer mainstream music, like the Download.com music section, or the n-number of alternative stations. So let’s begin.

Almost forgot; for most of these you need a reasonably fast connection, let’s say at least 64 kbps be the bare minimum. Otherwise, the music will be intermittent as the streaming packets will take time to download. There are stations aimed at narrowband / dialup users though, and you’ll have to look out for that. When choosing a station, make sure that you check the speed (it’s generally mentioned) and steer clear of the ones with bandwidth requirement way above yours. An important thing to note is don’t do too much of multitasking while browsing other websites (while listening to music), it’ll only hamper your music stream; i.e., unless you have a high speed connection, let’s say about 128 kbps above. Again as I tell you, what you can do is limited by your connection speed.

MSN Radio: Sorry, I’m allergic to Microucks, so forget about a review on this one.
AOL Radio: Windows required. Why?
BBC Radio: Needs Real Player, but that can be downloaded free. It has a distinctly British flavour, and is basically a recording of whatever is aired on the actual thing (the one that requires a small box with a knob and a long shiny metal rod, whatsitcalled?). The thing that becomes boring after a while is the natter, I prefer to have jockeytalk-less streams.
RealPlayer Radio: You’ll obviously require Real Player for this. Thankfully, there’s one for Linux too. But the variety of stations is less and many of them require subscription, although free previews are available. There are free unrestricted ones too, but they are provided by third-parties. Overall, could be better.
Rhapsody: Only for US, which is a bad thing in an internationalised web. Obviously, the free service is just meant to lure US subscribers into the paid service, so they don’t bother with others.
Mercora: It’s a P2P and legal radio service. You’ll need to download special Mercora software to browse. You can also download a Google Talk plugin from them. Innovative. But again, Windows only.
SHOUTcast: A free service, originally for Winamp, but supports any player. It itself won’t provide the service, it’ll just allow you to search for whatever you want.
Pandora: A part of the musical genome project, it has a good collection. It’s web-only, and works by asking you an artist or song that you like, and playing similar artists, including the one you gave. The problem is, I just don’t want to be restricted to one artist or genre, and it’s a serious drawback in this concept. Plus, the music keeps skipping, so it is irritating.
Last.fm: Whichever platform, you’re advised to use Mozilla Firefox for this. Frankly I’d approached this with the most amount of hope. I’d probably rate it the best service after Yahoo!. You can sign up for a free account, and download a free plugin called Audioscrobbler, which will integrate with whatever player you have and upload the songs played by it. The service will then create stations based on it. You need to download the Last.fm player too, and it’s free. You can discover people with the same music tastes, you get a personal music blog too. The selection is huge, and you have pre-set stations too. You can discover artist info, previews, buy downloads etc. The best thing about this service is the ranking feature, which will tell you the ranking of any artist, song or album and help you make your choice. The most disappointing thing – it didn’t work on my system as the player kept on crashing. With a bit of configuring, it might have worked, but with one last site to go, I abandoned it.
Live365: At last I’ve found my service. It has a HUGE database, lots of cool software to start your own station, free downloads (not mainstream though) and no player requirement. Lots of ads though in free mode; and the inserted ads in the audio streams would remind anybody about Yahoo!. It is formed by users creating stations, and has music to suit anyone’s tastes. All that you need is any media player capable of playing streams. The best thing – you don’t need an account (although you can make one for free), just go, browse and listen.

eGurucool.com – The best courses for school, board and entrance exams

People usually ask me a lot whether I take tuitions or go to some centre (for class X Board exams) and I generally tell them no. That isn’t completely true though, because I DO consult other sources. There come certain times when you have to get your doubts clarified and your school teachers just seem incapable of answering it, because they don’t deal with such advanced concepts. It’s at time like these when websites like eGurucool come handy. I’ve been using it for more than a year, and it had really helped me a lot. Sure, it’s a paid service, but the cost is miniscule to what you may have to spend getting tution from horrible and unqualified teachers running the show from their houses.

Now, these guys have a classroom course too. Although I’ve not done it and can only tell you from their product info pages, they say what they mean. I have visited their centre and they are well-equipped. Maybe Siddharth Razdan of our blog can tell you more, since he did their classroom, as well as online course. I’m going to restrict myself to the online one.

eGurucool.com provides courses for CBSE, from class IX-XII. And I can vouch for the fact that the content they provide is good. They have notes on Maths and Science, and the student can to choose to enroll for either subject or both (I took both). These notes deal with the topic in a pretty easy way, so it’s easy to understand them yourself. Before each chapter, there’s a ‘pre-test‘, a short test of a few basic questions which calls upon what you may have learnt in earlier classes about that topic. Then there’s the introduction, and the objectives (which I found useful as a sort of a checklist while studying and preparing for exams). Then come the topics, which can be dowloaded as zipped files, and can thus be read offline if you want. In case you want to print them, there are printer-friendly versions of the topics too. Of course, you can read them online anytime, anywhere. After going through all the topics, you can move on to the practice exercises, which come in two different ‘flavors’, standard and difficult. Within these, you have a grading system, easy one have a green button next to them, the next level amber, and the toughest ones red. These practice exercises are not timed, and the student has to check the answers himself by clicking on the accompanying link. A marking scheme is given with the answers, clearly spelling out how much marks should be given for a particular point in an answer. Then comes the actual timed test. Although it’s multiple choice, choose-the-option, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. The test has to be completed within a stipulated time and submitted. It is verified then and you are presented a report of your performance, with correct answers, your answer and an explanation of how the question should be solved. You’ll also get an analysis report spelling out how well you did within each particular topic in a chapter, by level of difficulty of questions (easy, intermediate or difficult) and by type of question (memory, comprehension or application). This analysis, although small, can be a useful tool in preparing yourself. After this you have a chapter summary (which gives a short summary of the chapter), and an activity page (but only in some cases).

Apart from the chapter tests, you also have section tests, which are subjective, to-be-evaluated-by-student-on-basis-of-marking-scheme in nature and cover a few chapters together. Again these tests are timed, you have to click the ‘view answersheet’ button before the time finishes, or you won’t be able to attempt the rest of the questions. No fooling around here, because once you take ANY test, you can’t take it again. The results of each and every test are stored in the performance tracker, from where you can view the results or answersheets of the tests you’ve given. This performance log while help you to keep a track of your progress. The only thing I don’t like about this is the interface, since it’s not divided subjectwise and you have to hunt down a test yourself.

You also have a doubt clearance tool that allows you to email your questions to their experts. I got a quota of 200 queries for one year, and I still have many left unused, so this isn’t going to be a problem. I’ve seen that their replies were quick and satisfactory in most cases. If you don’t understand their explanation, you can ask for a clarification. Many times, they do send you a full explanation as an email attachment.

There are discussion forums too for each individual subject, where students can discuss their problems among themselves, but they are not very active. Hardly anybody posts there, because I think all get their doubts clarified from the eGurucool experts. Still, it’d be a far better atmosphere if there was more activity there. Another facility on this site that needs work is the search facility, which is totally defunct and can never search anything out, just gives silly apologies all the time.

But the best thing I liked about this site is the question paper configurator. This tool is a really useful, because what it allows you to do is to generate your own question paper on any subject, any chapter, and you can even choose individual topics from a particular chapter anytime you want. You can choose between objective and subjective-type too. These can be accessed later too. It’s really helpful, because let’s say I’ve a class test coming up, then I can practice and test myself on any topic I want. And since there’s no limit to the questions you can make and their database of questions is huge, you get a different paper everytime.

There are other tools to, like bookmarks (which allows you to add bookmarks), and notes (which allows you to store your own memos on anything online at eGurucool). You can discover these yourself.

In the end, you also have the FLTs, Full Length Tests, which are for better practice before the Board exams. These are really good too, and they give 10 of these in both subjects, and thus cover all possible mark-distribution schemes that may come in the Board exams.

eGurucool also releases the solutions to all sets of the Board exam papers, so that post-exam, you can check out from a reliable source how well your exam went. This particular service is free and anyone can access it from their site.

Their customer care department, dealing with user problems of a non-academic nature also responds swiftly. In fact, I’ve met the division head of eGurucool a few times and he’s a really nice guy (I went to their office to enroll myself, and even though it was beyond office hours and many people had left, he personally saw to it that my account was activated that same day within 20 minutes) . He responded personally to each of my ‘complaints’, and had them rectified quickly. He used to keep a track of my progress. Altogether a nice chap.

I joined eGurucool because I wanted help, but didn’t want to be tired out by rushing to some tution centre right after coming from school; it becomes too hectic. eGurucool is the perfect solution for stressed out kids running about like bunny rabbits to and fro from school and tuitions, and finding no time left for themselves. What I like about the whole thing was th
e anytime-anywhere convenience. Even if I couldn’t login for a few days, that didn’t affect my schedule. I could login anytime of the day I wanted, even at midnight if it pleased me, and could access my notes on any topic even if was not at home (because of being dragged to some pesky relative’s house). Another advantage is the excellent doubt clearance and question paper generator, which I’ve already talked about.

There are many more online education sites catering to Indian students (most of them are totally useless), but the other major player is Compassbox.com, a division of Career Launcher. Although I’ve now joined Career Launcher for IIT coaching, still I’d say it’s not as good as eGurucool. I’d joined them for a test period and they have a better image, but they try to retain more control over a student by specifying an exact schedule to follow, which I don’t like. You could check it out too, but my advice, eGurucool is a really good way to prepare for the class X Board exams.