Convenient Internet Radio Stations Posted 2023-04-22
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I have an assignment due in a week so no better time to go down a rabbit-hole I
guess.
I was listening to aNON Radio -- SDF's community radio -- with the provided
stream URL in VLC. I liked the convenience of streaming directly into a media
player without annoying web interfaces and it got me thinking I could probably
scrape stream URLs from other online radio stations. Sure enough with the
Javascript console I was able to pull the URLs of a handful of local radio station
streams as well as some international stations of interest.
Managing all these URLs in a text file was unwieldy, especially when I wanted to
tune in on other devices. The solution I've found is to keep them in a XSPF file.
XSPF is an XML playlist format defined by Xiph.Org and is native to most good audio
players. In the XSPF file I can add metadata for station names, descriptions, and
logos. Now I have a portable file containing all the stations I might listen to
that I can transfer between devices, not unlike using OPML for RSS subscriptions.
It's not perfect, but it works on VLC, Clementine, and Foobar2000 (with a plugin).
I'll link my XSPF file on my homepage. I'm interested to know if anyone else has a
system like this? Station recs are also greatly appreciated. I've been enjoying
Shonan Beach FM, a jazz station out of Japan.
