Net radio was a really big thing in the 90's and I remember listening to people playing electronic music that way. You couldn't buy it anywhere but you could listen to it on the internet.
I guess they have other products now but I haven't heard of anyone using those either...
In 2021, I bought a soundbar from Creative. The quality of the soundbar was actually pretty good, but it had a really awful noisegate issue where if the scene was too quiet, it would just cut to zero. For some movies this wasn't a big deal, but for most movies it made them unwatchable.
We put up with it for a year, but we got sick of it and I was about to buy a replacement. I tried the updated firmware on Creative's website, and it didn't help, but then I found some YouTube video with like 10 views that claimed to have a fixed firmware from Creative that wasn't publicly available, and they had a link to some shady mega.co.nz download for it. Stuff like that screams "malware!", but I figured that I was about to throw the soundbar into the Goodwill pile anyway, so if I break it no big deal, and it's not like the soundbar was connected to the internet, just optical audio, and I don't think anyone could install a crypto minor on there, so against my better judgement I installed the firmware and...
It worked! It fixed the noisegate problems entirely, and now the soundbar is actually excellent. For some reason, Creative still hasn't bothered uploading the fixed firmware on their website though.
So it's weird, Creative is still around, and making theoretically-decent products, but they lack a lot of polish. Kind of a sad fall from grace.
I sometimes think it’s engineers bypassing QA that will never come.
Aureal made 3D audio for the first time - real 3D audio, ray-traced sound - and it was absolutely staggeringly amazing. I played the first Half-Life using this. It was incredible - unforgettable.
Creative destroyed them, to destroy the competition, and that technology far as I know has since then been lost - the 3D stuff I know of after that is not ray-traced.
Loads of music I discovered, which I wouldn't have through Spotify.
I'm reminded of listening to the Dr Demento radio show and discovering a lot of niche acts that way too, and realizing my dad was actually a cool guy for recommending it to me, and being surprised that it was still around as was he, at least at the time.
I just looked him up, and he's STILL at it, the madlad. Brings a smile to my face. Music really is universal.
Thanks for the reminder, happymellon!
The historical record is fairly clear about why the two stations came under the SomaFM banner, and the fact that they’re both based in SF probably didn’t hurt, but after looking into why they went their separate ways, I still don’t know why BAGeL Radio went independent again in 2021 or 2022 beyond a statement from the operator of BAGeL Radio on a Reddit post asking the same thing. I’m glad they both exist, obviously, and apparently the live nature of the BAGeL Radio broadcast was a factor in integrating it to SomaFM’s more passive playlist-based streaming setup, but that’s all I know.