Mindless Coding Music

Many people like to listen to music while they work. When programming, a great deal of concentration is required. One must be able to juggle many different kinds of information, remembering how various bits of your project interact.

There's a lot to keep track of. Distractions from your environment really hurt one's productivity while programming, and music can help.

Not just any sort of music, unfortunately. Many programmers have found rock or metal distracting, and have turned to electronica, dance or post-rock/instrumental rock, stuff they wouldn't normally consider.

So, without further waffle, here's a list of artists and streaming radio stations that some programmers find aid concentration.

Streaming stations

• WoED - World of European Dance. Dance & trance, focus on european stuff. High-quality streams, MP3/Windows Media/Real Media.
• Limbik Frequencies - "mix of ambient, downtempo, ethereal, industrial, and intelligent techno". They play stuff like Aphex Twin, Air, DJ Shadow, Loop Guru, Jega, etc. 128k mp3 stream.
• Digitally Imported - Trance, Vocal Trance, Chillout, Deep House, Hard Dance, Euro Dance, Progressive, Goa-Psy Trance, Hard Core, DJ Mixes, Drum 'n' Bass, Classic Electronica. Okay, so a lot of the genre names are totally gay, but some of the music is good. Also high-quality multi-format streams.
• Slay Radio - Mostly remixes of old Commodore-64 tunes. Offers streams of varying bitrate, mp3 format.
• Soma FM - Ecelectic Ambient, choose deep spaces beats, electronica, jazz or even 70's rock streams... its all good backround music. High bit rate streams and rare down times, one of the best online.

Artists

• Aphex Twin
• Autechre
• Belle Orchestre
• Boards of Canada
• Celestial
• Daft Punk
• Dead Can Dance
• Do Make Say Think
• Discordance Axis
• El Ten Eleven
• Explosions In The Sky
• Fear Factory
• Fog
• Isis
• Pink Floyd
• Radiohead
• Red Sparrowes
• REM
• Shark Quest
• Steve Reich
• The Album Leaf

Movie Soundtracks

• Gladiator
• Gattaca
• The Shawshank Redemption
• Solaris (very ambient, almost classical at times)
• Fight Club (occasionally intrusive (and has some dialogue) but fairly funky background music)
• Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
• The Hunt For Red October

Game Soundtracks

• Wipeout Pure