Sic transit, etc. Back in the dark ages (i.e. before GPS), whenever we drove to NYC we'd alternate between CBS and 1010 WINS to hear the traffic reports as we got close. End of an era.

The only thing that doesn't change is the inevitability of change.

Currently both of the sports talk radio stations in KC are on AM but the one that carries the Royals baseball games is changing over to a FM station this week.

Not a big deal because the content is not changing, just the call letters and location on the dial. At least there won't be static on the broadcast when there are storms in the area like you get on AM.

BTW - most new cars still have AM radio. I think it was Ford that recently said they were planning to stop offering standard AM but after an uproar they backed off that.

Isn't CBS radio available to stream online?

Looks like the answer may be yes...

https://www.cbsnews.com/radio/

FWIW, listening to our local university's radio station on my computer right now.

There are several smartphone apps that provide connections to radio stations nationwide. If local ones are declining, there are plenty of national ones to suit all views, interests and political persuasions.

iHeartRadio and TuneIn immediately come to mind.

That will certainly help me with the local road closures!

For traffic conditions, refer to Google maps

I know, we were shocked to hear as DH listens first thing every am and last thing as he goes to sleep. I'm going to have to get him an internet radio and he'll have to switch to WINS 1010. Both apparently are owned by the same firm, and so far they are keeping WINS as all news. So hard to find headline info in the metro area without spin. We'll miss CBS a lot!

Thank you Annie, for "getting it". It's really that I am so used to the same guys talking it over every morning, as I try to force my eyes open. I realize that there are alternatives, but this is like when you favorite tee shirt gets a hole so big that you have to say goodbye to it. I will add this memory to all the other things.

Im another who listens to AM news radio. I find the traffic and weather to be a kind of entertainment. When they talk about the location of traffic, i can picture it. The news is KYW 1060 but you can also listen on FM. It sounds different. They used to run a constant ticker tape sound in the background and there was great dismay when that was dropped.

Ive also tried listening to KYW and our local PBS station on the Audacy app, but i prefer just switching on the radio.

You're fortunate that you can pick up the signal. My favorite station - the one I mentioned above, only comes in clear on my car radio - or over the internet - it's on the FM dial, too. There are a number of religious and top 40 stations with really powerful signals that crowd out smaller stations here.

I am another one who listens to my local AM radio station that gives the news, weather and traffic on the 1's.

As an above poster suggested I'll have to see what AM radio station carries google maps on it with voice overlay and gives me updates 5 times an hour.

I do enjoy my local AM station, especially in the car. While I have google maps up from my phone. I have another that I switch to sometimes, just to remember there is another world out there.

The push to EV interrupts with the AM signal, FWIW.

I was actually driving my car yesterday listening to CBS 880 when they announced it. If I'm not listening to my other station that I like that plays rock on FM, I'll put on 880 quite often. Sounds weird but when I'm stressed out about something I prefer it.

My car doesn’t have a CD player. I really miss that, grabbing a CD or audiobook for the car. It was easier to controll the play than using my phone. Oh, and the ”new”car doesn’t have an audio jack, either. I still miss my car cassette player two cars ago. I have a couplle of tapes I won’t find online. I could hav ethem converted and put on the phone, but it is not as easy to control on the phone.

I miss a lot of the oldie stations. So hard to find a station that plays 60s and 70s

But, i can go into my grocery and Ace and True Value and hear ”the music of our lives”!

dedtired, I love KYW1060!

" As an above poster suggested I'll have to see what AM radio station carries google maps on it with voice overlay and gives me updates 5 times an hour "

The majority of car manufacturers, and it's perhaps all of them, offer compatibility with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay so that Google/Waze or Apple map navigation and traffic information can be displayed on dashboard screens. This information is much more accurate than radio reports because the info comes not only from in-road sensors and traffic management agencies but is also supplemented directly from drivers on the road. Updated every minute or so. No need to wait 12 minutes for radio traffic info that's often stale and inaccurate anyway.

As mentioned above, car manufacturers are leaning toward removing AM receivers from cars. It's a dying market and also as mentioned above, stations are going belly-up.

Get with modern times. Dump the horse, dump the AM radio, and follow the overwhelming trend of what people do these days.

" I miss a lot of the oldie stations. So hard to find a station that plays 60s and 70s "

Put Pandora (it's free) on your smartphone and create playlists for your own "stations". Or use their pre-seeded stations. Connect your phone with Bluetooth to the car and play the music through your car's sound system

Or use Spotify or other similar services in the same manner.

I have sirius and they have lots of channels with older music...from the swing era to channels called the 50s or the 70s to soft rock oldies like The Blend or The Bridge. They also have audio feeds from "news" channels on TV and things like Dr radio where various doctors of all kinds are hosting radio programs. And they have comedy channels, "spa" music, and acres of sports for those interested in it. I just wish they had better options for classical music.

carolb, CBS won't be streaming on line any more as the station itself will not be broadcasting at all. Thus the need to find a substitute. Bloomberg radio is all news, but focused on business and financial.

Thanks for clarifying, Annie.

And AM radio is still useful. Pretty sure it will never go away entirely. I recall Radiolab pointing out years ago that virtually every technology invented by humans is still in use somewhere on the planet.

I can't listen to music over Sirius because the sound quality is so poor. They have to use a low bitrate for their audio signals because the satellite transmission pathway has limited bandwidth. The resulting sound is shallow and flat, unpleasant to hear.

(I have this experience periodically when I buy a new car, they typically come with a 3 month Sirius subscription. Music is an important hobby of mine and I'm probably more sensitive to sound quality than others are. )

We just bought a brand new 2024 Rav 4 and it has AM stations. DH listens to classical music on FM stations.

For those with CD collections, you can listen to your music in your car quite easily. You "rip" the CDs (which means to copy off the files to your PC) with easy to use software - iTunes is straightforward and comes in Mac and Windows PC versions. Then copy the files to a flash drive (thumb drive) with the right kind of plug that matches what your car has.

Most cars these days have USB-C sockets. I know that recent year Toyotas use USB-C sockets. Load the flash drive with your music and plug in. The infotainment system will access and play what's on the flash drive. You control the quality of the sound by what you specify as the quality for the digital files to be produced by the ripping software. Many but not all cars will play CD quality sound, others will require using lower quality.

Either way. this offers the best sound quality you can play in a car. Better than FM, better than streaming, better than Sirius.

What I reall want to do is: when I spy a CD in its jewel box and think ”oh, I haven’t listened to that in ages, I love that one”, I grab it, pop it in the car player, and drive off singing along. And I don’t have to look at the infotainment screen. (I do appreciate the flexibility of language that we can have a word like ”infotainment”.) So thanks for the tech, sometimes I want something else.

I really miss the one-button radio presets.

I’m glad to hear Sirius sound isn’t so great. We had the three-month trial, but it wouldn’t let me do some features while driving or waiting on a freight train, and I didn’t want to sit in my driveway going through all the options. It wasn’t important enough to me. We let it lapse.

AM radio waves travel much farther than FM waves so it does come in handy between cities in the dead zones for FM. My Favorite FM talk radio channel is only good for 25 miles from it's source, but they simulcast on another AM radio wavelength and gets me 150 miles before I lose it.

As a kid with those cheap Japaneses AM radios I was able to pick up Chicago stations 400 miles away late at night. Now with the IHeartradio app on my phone I can listen to my favorites anyplace in the country, but it's not the radio station but the hosts that make it enjoyable. Another CBS station just wouldn't be the same without the hosts. Tom Bernard retired in 2022 as the morning show host on KQRS after 37 years and something I looked forward to turn on but now it's just another classic rock and roll station.

I'd be lost without news-type radio, but I'm fortunate enough to have a great NPR station in the Philly area. But they don't have the traffic reports except when there's a real problem, but I listen at home. If I need traffic info, I guess I am lost!

We have a huge collection of CDs and have ripped all of them and I have them on Dropbox so that I can access them on multiple devices.

We have also put collections on thumb drives, and that's all we use in the car now. Older cars used to have CD players, and we've used those in the past.

In L.A., we would listen to KXLU on the radio, especially in the morning, because we lived very close to Loyola Marymount University, where the station broadcast from. However, it was not a very powerful station, and so if we went too far from Westchester, we could not get it. In San Francisco, I would listen to KUSF from the University of San Francisco, and I think it was more powerful than KXLU. When I lived in Houston, I listened to KTRU, the Rice University station or KPFT, which was bombed in 1970 by right wing radicals or the KKK. There was another underground radio station in 1968 KFMK that played underground music and also had secret codes it would use to warn people when police raids were imminent. The DJs would always talk like they were stoned, in order to appeal to the audience.

Somehow this station got converted to a conservative talk radio station, which was scary. People would call in, especially to Marie Wilson, and give her political comments, especially about the draft and the Vietnam War. I remember one woman called in to complain about people who had burned or destroyed records at draft boards. She said that she had a question for all of the "pseu-doo" intellectuals, and Maris Wilson corrected her by saying, that's pronounced "So-do". The question was "What about all the patriot young men who don't mind getting drafted? Are they going to destroy their records also?"

I listen to the local all-news/weather/traffic station when I'm in the car. I don't think it's going anywhere. There was an article about it not too long ago, and apparently it's a cash cow.

There has been a lot of consolidation in the radio business in past decades. There are a few large owners with a few hundred stations in their portfolios, smaller ones with dozens. Many owners fill the 24 hours of each day with a lot of centrally produced, prerecorded programming.

It's not a particularly lucrative business- I just looked at financial report for some of the publicly owned larger ones and most had losses. I think the radio market is in decline.

But what about WKRP? I really miss that!

Our car has a CD player and even a *changer* that sits in the trunk. However...I think a CD is stuck in the dashboard slot. I should get that fixed. Even if we never drive very far, I could sit in the car with music blasting through the great speaker system! (DH doesn't 'get' playing music above a whisper. And I'm getting deaf.)

I wonder who fixes automobile sound systems.

I'll bet you could find a YouTube how-to video, chisue 🙂

I recall I amazed my cousin by fixing the CD player on her home sound system some years ago. There was a CD stuck in it, and I got it out after opening the back of the unit and all I needed to use was a screwdriver.

We like to listen to audiobooks on CD, on road trips. Last fall when we got back from a trip, we traded in our vehicle. Two days later we realized we had left Disc 5 of a Stanley Tucci memoir in the player! Of course the vehicle was already gone. We explained to the lending library. They said well, they are not replacing audiobook CDs anymore, it’s all going to Hoopla or whatever.

On the plus side, someone who knew nothing in our gap of knowledge about Stanley, gave DH the same book in hardcover as a gift! Now we just have to get someone to ride along and read it to us.

bpath, I love to read out loud and don't care much for driving, so would be happy to come along on your next trip. ;-)

There are some complete episodes of WKRP on YouTube that I've enjoyed. I love audiobooks, and was so happy when I had apps for my phone to stream them (Libby and Audible) rather than all those CDs.

The radio station in Cathedral City that I listen to, KWXY, plays oldies from the 60s and 70s, but just a few years ago it played oldies from the 40s and 50s and a lot of big band music, which I liked better because I was not used to hearing it. Big Band music is popular in Palm Springs, and so I don't know why they stopped playing it.

Parov Stelar

Caro Emerald

and Yolanda Be Cool

which have retro sounds are also popular here.

For those in the Boston area, no navigation app can compete with WBZ's AM radio traffic report. Their updates are up to date, include info on what caused the hold up, which lane is closed, whether it is new or mostly resolved, etc. This kind of traffic report allows you to make decisions well in advance as opposed to apps that alert you to traffic when it's too late. While I am driving I can't be trying to scroll ahead on my car screen to look for traffic backups many miles up ahead.