Back when I had more hair, there was a great independent radio station called KFAT in Gilroy, California, that played western swing, blues, and other genres of music that you rarely heard on other stations. KFAT went off the air 20 years ago (the call letters now belong to a Top 40 station in Anchorage, Alaska), but a bunch of KFAT on-air personalities started up a new station--KPIG--that broadcasts exclusively over the Internet from kpig.com. Now I can still get my heapin' helpin' of "fat" tunes even though I dwell in far-off Colorado.

Lots of AM and FM radio broadcasts can be heard on the Internet, many providing programming from the quirky to the sublime to listeners who are beyond the reach of the stations' local transmitters. Some stations broadcast only on the Net, pumping out great jazz, the latest trance and techno mixes, and news and talk in just about every language. To hear them, all you have to do is tune in using a streaming audio player.

My favorite is Nullsoft's Winamp, but others--Microsoft's Windows Media Player, Musicmatch's Musicmatch Jukebox, Apple's QuickTime, and RealNetworks' RealOne--will also do the job. You can download these players from PCWorld.com's Downloads library.

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