Good things come in 3

As in CBC Radio 3.

I'd been meaning to make this post for a little while, but since they redesigned and relaunched their site yesterday, it seems like the perfect time.

In a nutshell, CBC Radio 3 is the best thing to happen to music since the Gregorian chants.

First of all, all the music they play is Canadian, and generally indie stuff that gets ignored by mainstream radio (Sloan, Metric and other obvious exceptions apply). Secondly, what with it being a CBC Radio property, it's commercial free. No interruptions except those from interesting and insightful hosts.

But all of that, even taken together, is not why I'm sitting here bothering to type out such effusive words of praise for CBC Radio 3. A radio station that plays good indie music? I could listen to the Edge out of Toronto and (almost) get that. I could get a satellite radio and have the commercial-free component too.

What makes CBC Radio 3 different? Unlike anything else I've ever seen, these guys have figured out exactly how to do Internet radio.

Anything that's more than just "host playing songs" is archived in podcast form. The entire station can be streamed through iTunes or the MP3-playing program of your choice. There's a section for bands to register and upload their own music (nearly 20,000 bands listed as of this writing). There's fairly extensive concert listing for the entire country. There are special concerts and sessions, all of which are archived as well.

A new feature this week is genre-specific streams - if you don't want the main CBC Radio 3 feed, you can listen to a feed that's just pop music (or just rock, or hip-hop, or electronica).

But the best feature of all - by far, and I'm not exaggerating to call it one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on the Internet - is the playlist function. Essentially, you can add any song in Radio 3's library to a personal playlist - a recent improvement allows you to have multiple playlists - which you can then do as much with as you could if you had the songs on your computer itself. Play through them, shuffle them, put them in whatever order you want, and listen to them whenever you want. It feels like pirating music, but it's completely legal (and, since it's CBC, arguably *endorsed* by the government). Plus you can browse the playlists of every other user on the site.

Admittedly it's not perfect. There are certain artists - the New Pornographers and Nous Non Plus are the two to come to mind right away - who don't let you add their music to playlists for some reason. The concert listing could use some tweaks - if you search for a city, you still have to go through the results day by day, even though they might be weeks apart in some cases. And there are probably other drawbacks I haven't discovered yet (much to my surprise, though, streaming quality is not one of them).

Here is a link to my playlist (which I'm adding to more or less daily at this point), with the ability of playing each song. If you're interested, that is. I'll probably link it over on the left somewhere eventually too.

Seriously. You can discover new music - all of which is Canadian - you can pick and choose what you like and play it back whenever you want, and you can do all of this at no cost whatsoever.

It's awesome. There's no other way to describe it.

--Ryan