Remember how classical music stations were 15 years ago? They announce "We will now listen to Brahms's symphony #1 in C major." Then they'd play *the whole symphony!*, then you'd eagerly listen for the announcement of what you'd just listened to, and there it would be: "That was a performance of Brahms's
first symphony in C major, by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy."
Now, classical stations play only 3 minutes of music at a time -- never a whole composition, just an excerpt -- as befits the attention span of today's generation.
This depressing change had us classical music buffs running for the record stores, hoping to amass a great enough music collection that we could listen - in our cars - to whatever piece of classical music we wanted. Randomizers, built into the CD's, would give that "spontaneity" characteristic that we used to enjoy when we listened to the radio.
Now I'm again feeling nostalgic. For even if I had 100 CD's in my car and my CD player could randomize all of them, I still miss that comforting deep voice that comes on at the end, telling me the details of what I had just listened to.
What I would like is a classical CD that has "announcement tracks" between each piece. Someone should start a service, where you mail in your favorite classical CD, and they copy it and add in announcement tracks (the service can make up its own "station name" for the announcements), then mails back to me the "radioized" CD.
Then I pop it in, and -- no more squinting to read the back of the CD while I'm driving, either -- and I've got my classical radio station again, just as it once was.
Would also work great for pop/rock CD's.