What music do you listen to while programming?

I tend to listen to anything that gets my adrenaline going. "Escape" by Craig Armstrong is a good example of what I like to listen to. Also, I like to listen to techno, classical, a bit of opera, and bagpipes. Half of the songs on my playlist though are from game sound tracks (Dragon Age: Origins, Medieval 2: Total War, Shogun 2, etc).

And don't worry, I wear headphones so that people don't have to listen to the bagpipes

Megadeth, i never seem to get bored of them

Being from Norway I listen to Black metal of course. Mostly metal though: Nevermore, Megadeth, Emperor, Solefald and the like. Sometimes I listen to Deep purple, Led Zeppelin etc.

as I'm an oldschool demoscene coder the best music to code for me is chipmusic

I usually program listening to either videogame soundtracks or 90s dance hits.

we do not speak of the 90's music scene anymore....or the 80's....the horror...the horror....lol jk

There are some amazing internet radio stations you guys should try. These sites have lots of channels you should check out. The ones below are ones I like to listen to. They are mostly without words.

Listening to someone say stuff uses the same part of your brain as writing code, words will distract you.

Some of these will seem strange at first especially done zone.

DI.fm - chillout - my fav
sky.fm - solo piano
somafm.com - drone zone
somafm.com - groove salad
somafm.com - space station soma

I realy like music music from clint mansell or two steps from hell those orchestra's dont realy know which genre that should be though.

I used to listen trance/D'n'B music before, however now I think programmer's best friend is silence!

Its realy interesting to read what other people are listening to while programming.

I myself listen to metal most time, power- and speedmetal to be more precise and i sometimes switch to more agressive stuff like some deathmetal or industrial stuff.

If i have to concentrate slightly i like to listen to music without lyrics. Something that comes up in such situations is powerglove, a band that covers game and tv-series music in metal songs. Great for programming.

And on real hard problems i have to have real silence around me. It seems like my head can only solve difficult problems in complete silence. Does anyone else have this too?

Hey i just found something new that realy motivates me during programming sessions: machinaesupremacy.com/

Those guys make awesome metal-music and they use the Sound chip from the C64 a lot in their songs. And the give away almost 100 songs for free on their site. Just follow the download link and give it a try. They also have a few cds you can get from amazon those are a bit more "mainstream" (means less squeaky old-school-gaming-music parts ) but also realy good.