So, not skritter related, but:

Does anyone know any online Chinese radio stations to stream? Googling hasn't brought me much luck (dead links, or I don't understand the Chinese perhaps :p.)

I recorded a few hour or so long shows last I was in Xi'an, but was kind of looking for new material. Any ideas? (BTW, if no luck and anyone wants any of them uploaded, I'll be happy to).

Cheers

Byz

Its not exactly radio, but this might help - http://www.kugou.com/ - if you download the program it will let you stream or download pretty much any Chinese song you want.

Great :). Does it have spoken material too, or is it just songs?

Byz

I've not checked properly, I know if you type in the Chinese for audio book,有声书， it should bring up a few。 If you really want spoken stuff you should check out www.tingbook.com it is an audio book store that should has a fair bit of stuff.

Have a look of http://www.youku.com/ .

Try these for radio:
http://radiotime.com/genre/c_139/Chinese.aspx
http://www.surfmusic.de/country/china.html

The first link is the best. For tv, if you havent already found it, you can watch cctv here (it really is as bad as you remember it though):

http://zhibo.cctv.com/index.shtml?Channel=cctv_p2p_cctv1

And while im at it, theres a pretty much infinite collection of chinese books online for free at:

http://www.tianyabook.com/

Combine this one with Dimsum from mandarin tools (its free, google it) and its unbeatable for reading practice.

I tried the link to CCTV, and I couldn't download the required plug-in (something about the plug-in being incompatible with my Firefox); I also tried it in Safari, but that didn't work either.

Has anyone had that happen to them? Anyone know how to fix this error?

As already suggested above, Radiotime is great for getting Chinese radio. I also listen to a lot of BBC World Service's "China Focus" 中国焦点, you can download the podcast directly from the BBC website, http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/simp/services/2009/09/000000_china_focus_podcast.shtml, or find it on iTunes. Another good Mandarin news service is Radio France International's podcast, search for RFI - 时事新闻 on iTunes. Lastly, if you want stories and narratives rather than news, check out the 静雅思听 podcasts on iTunes as well, and they're a good bit easier to follow along with than the news broadcasts, which tends to be really fast and emotionless.

Check them out, I'm sure you'll find something you like!

Good show on the links :). Those podcasts in particular are excellent!

Many thanks

and if you are in China, there are sites like google.cn/music or haoting.com which let you make your own playlist out of tons of searchable songs (mostly Chinese). Besides loading fast and being legal in China they also have scrolling lyrics as part of the player, which is nice for practicing reading and singing along.

On the other side of the strait (Taiwan), you also have really nice radio such as :

ICRT (eng, cn) : http://www.icrt.com.tw/
Hit FM (cn, pop music) : http://hitoradio.im.tv/
Kiss Radio : http://www.kiss.com.tw/

many thanks