Having a pile of podcasts and audiobooks ready at hand makes long drives on ski trips much more tolerable to me... But I do keep the Sirius subscription around just for NPR and BBC...

Sadly, it appears they started firing the human DJs several years back -- see https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/02/10/will-firin... for an example.

Cellphone plan options in Canada are punitive and oppressive. Getting coverage in USA & Canada is painful.

When I was driving in the States, data-usage was measured in kB.

There were a couple changes they've made recently that made this make sense. One, all their car subscriptions now come with an app version. And two, they have a pretty cool Web UI (https://player.siriusxm.com) where you can listen to any channel live or experiment with "Xtra" channels (it's a Pandora integration.)

My use case is that I work mostly from home and want something mindless to play in the background while I'm working. Spotify playlists quickly become repetitive. Sirius is "set it and forget it"--I have all the channels and Xtra channels I want in a grid on their website, and I have it up on a second monitor so I can just click on whatever channel I want.

I still miss Spotify on occasion, but if I want a specific song or artist I can just go to YouTube and stream it.

Having said all this, yesterday and today I've just been streaming long house mixes on YouTube. I wanted something a bit more upbeat than the Chill channel and I've heard all the songs on BPM. But I'm sure I'll be back to Sirius soon. :)

Also just a warning - SiriusXM doesn't just let you leave. They have some of the most aggressive "winback" salespeople in the business, and they will NEVER stop mailing you offers that look like something else, calling you, and emailing you offers once you manage to leave. Their skeevy tactics have put me off the company as a whole forever.

The worst are the ones in blank envelopes with no return address that look like they could be from a bank or something.

I have never subscribed to a streaming music service as I would rather purchase a song I like once and own it forever. So di.fm and several dance music artist shows keep new music coming in.

I have SiriusXM in the car and had it when it was just XM. I only listen to small number of channels and when I don't want to hear what's on any of them, I have an iPod Touch that I can use over Bluetooth to listen to purchased music, downloaded podcasts, and audiobooks.

I really wish Sirius would simulcast di.fm's channels just for the variety that they can't (and don't try to) compete with.

XM used to have a clever little device specifically designed for this use case -- the XM-PCR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM_PCR). It was a little XM receiver that plugged into your PC and could be driven from there via client software. And the protocol for communicating with the device was pretty open, so hackers quickly put together really good native clients for Windows, OS X, Linux, etc. that were miles better than both XM's default client and their Web player.

It only lasted for a couple years, though, because those same hackers eventually figured out a way for clients to just rip every song that passed through the XM-PCR into high-bitrate MP3 files on your hard drive. So what went from a neat, hackable little device quickly turned into a music pirate's dream.

There was a gentleman's agreement for a while between the developers of the major clients not to take advantage of this capability, as they all knew that if it ever got exploited at scale XM would shut down the PCR and all their work would instantly be rendered worthless. But inevitably someone shipped a client with this "feature", and XM predictably stopped selling the PCR and remotely disabled all existing units. Boom, so ends a scene.

(Here's a contemporary story from Ars Technica with more detail on the shutdown: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2004/08/4147-2/)

It was all too bad, as like I said, if your use case was playing music while you worked the PCR was a really cool little device. I suppose this is why we can't have nice things :-/

I will admit that I really like some of the programs. Business channel in particular is decent. Between interviews of Larry Summers and Madeline Albright it feels like a nice departure from BREAKING NEWS COVERAGE.

And I am saying it as a person who has audio books ready to go if traffic gets too heavy.

Now even Howard Stern hardly shows up and is doing puff piece shows with Hillary Clinton in between his reality TV nonsense.

I remember listening to one show and half the callers were truckers where it became a running joke.

There was a period of time where, after work, some friends and I would get together in one of our university's research labs to solder keyboards. It was always empty by then. We'd put on soma.fm and then get to work. Good times.

How so? If it had an FM tuner, you can use an inline modulator.

Also a fun little note - if you have a standalone radio with active service, then turn it off and stuff it in a box, cancel the service, and wait a few months or a year before pulling it back out, you'll have free service for the life of the radio. They stop sending the device specific kill codes after a while so it will just keep working.

I recently got into this as a hobby! Bought a cheap portable shortwave radio and every night this week I've sat outside or near the window to see how far away I could pick stuff up from. So far I've confirmed broadcasts from Romania, South Korea, Cuba, and a few across the US. It's usually just preachers or state propaganda, but just the hunt for new stations is half the fun!

It started when I was young and not tired enough to goto sleep. I had a decades-old transistor radio and would scroll through the dial using the smallest fractions of adjustment and hearing the world open to me.

Dark of night, speaker pressed to my ear so my parents wouldn't hear and yell at me. Languages I'd never heard before and had no way of knowing where they were.

Magical is the best way I can describe the experience.

The world became both small, and vast in the same moment.

I even considered buying it anyway since I like to go on trips to remote areas (fishing/camping) and can't rely on data for my phone for Spotify. In many rural places there is only a single radio station and even then it may be mostly static. But I found in those locations even Satellite reception was spotty, especially in the mountains or valleys I frequented.

Compared to top-40 FM radio, Sirius is amazing. It had its time. But comparing it to the internet with Youtube and Spotify (or Apple Music, etc.) just blows it away.

I moved furniture for a few years in my early 20s, and none of the trucks had working air conditioning. That was during a heat wave with 110 F heat, which translates to 120+ at the top of a trailer. The air conditioning should have worked at the very least to prevent a heat-exhaustion death.

Some things in life will never change, and those things well and truly are $#!@.

Music channels were outright weird and all of them played may be 20 songs again and again.

They had zero diversity of music. There are plenty of non-white, non-american born people in North America and yet they did not have any Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Punjabi channels.