Betty Woo | # 1 | 2008-02-03, 02:03 | Report

I'm new (obviously) and from another planet - I'm a Mac-ian.

This means I'm kinda spoiled since three applications and !!*boom*!! - all the radio stations I want.

However, this here N800 is a bit trickier, I see. Instead of downloading and futzing around in the dark, I was wondering if someone may be able to tell me (or direct me to the proper application) that'll allow me to listen to the following stations:

NPR (any, although if I went local, I wouldn't mind the Boston, DC or LA feed) - http://www.npr.org

Radio Nova (Paris) - http://www.novaplanet.com

KCRW (live or music - I don't mind) - http://www.kcrw.org

I guess I should be at least marginally interested in CBC radio (not that I've actually gone looking for it, but, well, it seems somehow unpatriotic to have at least one of the local stations on it)

I did manage to get WFMU onto one of the streamers but damned if I can remember how to reproduce those steps

I figure if I can understand how to get these stations, I can maybe figure out how to get others that eventually pique my interests on my iMac.

And, while I'm on a roll: is there a website out there that does a better job at describing these radio streams? A name isn't descriptive and it seems like a waste of time to sit there and load each one to decide if it's something I might like... .

Um. Yeah. Enough queries for one thread.

Suggestions?

Thanks.

Betty Woo | # 2 | 2008-02-03, 06:51 | Report

OK... answering my own post (but, hopefully, providing info for newbies like me ).

1. I looked up the N800 in Wikipedia to find out what streaming audio formats the embedded tuner accepts: .pls and .m3u.

2. I looked up on Google to see what the common players for these formats are: iTunes, WinAmp, XMMS (which I take it is Linuxian).

3. Ergo, as long as there's an audio option for one of these players on the station's site, I should, in theory, be OK.

Went to the home site, wanted the Boston news site (WBUR), jumped over to http://www.wbur.org. I was doing this on my iMac since the page downloads are a lot slower on the N800 (which is a big letdown but I guess I'll have to get used to it).

I went back to the N800 and found the page. Strangely, the 'Listen Live' button on the iMac's page didn't show up on the N800. So I just entered the url directly on the N800 (http://www.wbur.org/listen/). That brought up a page of player choices on the iMac and the N800. On the N800, I chose WMMS for the heck of it and the N800 started buffering away and got it. So, of course I went up to the 'Media player - Now playing' tab -> Clip -> Add media bookmark... and named the station. That was one station down.

I went to the site on the N800. I quickly clicked on the 'ecoute' box (if you're not fast enough, the box gets covered up by another box on the site). The player options pop up. I just chose 'mp3/iTunes' and, voila! There she was in the media player and there I was joyfully saving as another media bookmark.

Another weird disconnect between what was showing up on my browser on my iMac and the N800... .

On my iMac, when you went to the home page, I clicked on the upper banner for 'Select a channel to listen online'. I just clicked on one of the boxes and java (I'm assuming) box jumped out and offered some regular player suggestions.

On my N800, there were no visible boxes. So I just hoped for the best and clicked where a box should be. It worked (although I don't know why they weren't actually visible). That took me to a non-java page with the same suggestions. I picked 'iTunes/mp3' and away the buffering went and on came the station pledge break . Ah, well... the music'll eventually come back.

Yeah. Well. Um. I'll get around to that eventually.

I guess my two biggest lessons:

1. check out the station's web site on your usual computer (preferably while the N800 is there, too) so that you can compare the pages on both machines and at least guess where the proper buttons and boxes may be on the wonky N800 site.

2. stick with iTunes, WinAmp or MSSX options whenever possible and most stations will buffer just fine.

It would be a *great* future newbie tutorial.

I would imagine that most people wanting to access radio stations already know what they want when they get the N800 and there's nothing more frustrating than just wanting to get your top 10 international stations on this freakin' thing without having to go through all this time-consuming effort. It's just not intuitive at all.

Off to get some more!

krisse | # 3 | 2008-02-03, 17:24 | Report

Betty, first of all thanks for the very enthusiastic comment you left on my website.

Are you using an N800 with OS 2008, or is it still on OS 2007? OS 2008 uses a completely new browser which is technically very similar to Firefox, and has much more compatibility with websites. It may display websites much more like what you're seeing on the Mac. Incidentally, are you using Firefox on your Mac or Safari?

OS 2008 also has a wider compatibility with audio standards so it's more likely to work with internet radio stations.

Regarding intuitiveness, part of the problem is that there's a wide range of streaming standards, and another problem is that many stations (including the BBC) do their best to actively prevent people listening to the stream directly. The BBC stations regularly change their streaming addresses so even if you save them correctly they will eventually get out of date and not work any more. (The BBC's website even denies that they CAN be listened to directly!) It's hard to make any single internet radio system comprehensive under these circumstances.


I'd love to help but I'm not sure exactly what you're asking for. I already did the tutorial on internet radio stations (and recently rewrote and reshot it for OS 2008), is there something in particular you think is missing?

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Last edited by krisse; 2008-02-03 at 17:30.

Betty Woo | # 4 | 2008-02-04, 02:07 | Report

First thing I did with PlayThing [name subject to change on a whim] was to fire up the tutorial on how to upgrade. Total upgrade time: less than 10 minutes.

I usually end up having both browsers open (although my #1's Firefox). This has more to do with my tendency to have open a lot a lot of tabs at the same time I'm just... um... not that good at concentrating on one thing long enough, usually, to have less than 10 tabs open so I tend to spread 'em across two browsers. I bad.

I was speaking about the intuitiveness of getting preferred radio stations bookmarked on the N800, specifically... especially if it's paired up with the problem of station web sites not being rendered true in the N800 broswer window. Who knows, though. Perhaps you have secretly uncovered a conspiracy to further discourage direct radio streaming. That'd be neat!

I guess it depends on the radio stream itself, too. I would think that any station that relies on pledge drives (like any of the National Public Radio (NPR) stations in the States and WFMU) *want* internet listeners. God knows WFMU got a $125US pledge from me last year and I'm clear across the continent from the station's home in New Jersey. I also think a sizeable minority of their operating budget is coming from non-US pledges.

I've found CKRW have also been very faithful to their steams. But, again, they're pledge-based since they're part of NPR.

I think the thing about the tutorial that threw me off a bit was the use of the BBC stations. The ones I wanted were conveniently pre-installed for me so perhaps they're the easiest ones to program in the first place. If someone was looking for a specific radio station and the procedure was slightly out of the BBC example, the person's hooped. Maybe a couple of real world examples that address things like which of the most common plug-ins will work and ways to pinpoint the streaming addresses? A Part Deux, if you will?

Like I mentioned, I had two major problems;

1. I didn't get from the tutorial which player icons worked the best (iTunes, WinAmp, RealPlayer, QuickTime, etc.) or what I should be looking for in streaming formats (.pls and .m3u) so I didn't know what to chose once I got to a web page that had player options.

2. My browser simply didn't pick up some of the boxes on a couple of station web sites that contained links to the stream - unless I concurrently ran my iMac's browser that rendered the page properly and simply guestimated where a box *should* be on the N800's browser page.

As a newbie, I wouldn't know at this point *what* the expectations are for this browser so boxes not being rendered correctly doesn't seem like an obvious sign of trouble (if it is... I'm still not sure if my browser's kinky or it's just the way the browser handles some pages).

Update: I just got back from a friend - the same one who showed me his N800 and got me excited in the first place. His browser in OS2008 clearly showed the erstwhile missing boxes on the www.kcrw.org web page. So I went to investigate and, because pages are so slow to download, I'd chosen View -> Show images -> Never. Once I reverted to Always, the boxes appear as they should at that site. But the page is still slow to load (14 seconds).

At www.novaplanet.com, if you don't tap on the listening box quick enough, it still gets eaten up by a text box that's been shoved over from the far right. And it still takes 16 seconds to load the whole page.

My iGoogle page, accessed by his N800, is slightly better than when it's on my N800 - my gadgets have only been shoved over to the right about 2/3rds across the page (making them irritating, but possible, to read) while they get shoved 3/4ths of the way across the page in my browser (making them too irritating to bother with at all). In this case, I'm sure we were both on the same screen settings.

His N800 also has 'Rhapsody' installed (even though he bought it in Canada), which I can't do it since I guess the application can detect that the application is in Canada. So, clearly, something's happened between the time he purchased his N800 and me purchasing mine

So maybe the problem for me figuring out the radio station conundrum breaks down to this:

1. I didn't know what audio format in particular to look for,

2. I'm not sure if my browser's rendering pages correctly so it's sometimes hard to even find the audio options on the page.

3. I haven't a clue how efficient this particular browser is at rendering pages, now that I've had a bit of a chance to compare two N800s. The New York Times home page, www.nytimes.com, takes about 18 seconds to load (and looks like crap). Is this normal? I dunno. I'm a verbose newbie, after all.

These page times don't seem to change much if I'm at home or out with the N800 in a cafe. So I have no frame of reference to figure out if my frustrating internet radio search was caused by me missing a fundamental step or some factor that had nothing to do with me (like a still less-than-ideal browser).

On the other (final) hand, I gots me some of my favorite radio stations now and I've hooked up an old pair of good RCA-plugged computer speakers so now I can listen to the radio in my bedroom.

Which, for some reason, makes me very happy.

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Last edited by Betty Woo; 2008-02-04 at 02:14.

sjgadsby | # 5 | 2008-02-04, 15:19 | Report

Using your N800:

1. Open a web browser window and go to NPR.org.
2. Tap "STATIONS" in the horizontal menu bar near the top of the page.
3. Tap "City".
4. Type "Boston" into the "Enter a city" box.
5. Select "Massachusetts" from the "Select a state" list.
6. Tap the "find" button.
7. WGBH-FM: 89.7 is the first station listed, so we'll go with that one. Tap the "WGBH-FM Homepage" link.
8. Tap "Radio" in the menu on the left side of the page to expand that portion of the menu.
9. Tap "Listen WGBH 89.7".
10. In the "Listen here or in your favorite player" section, tap and hold on "MP3". In the context menu that opens, select "Copy link location". This will copy the URL of this link to the clipboard. We may want it a little later.
11. Again in the "Listen here or in your favorite player" section, tap (but don't hold) "MP3". Media Player will load, buffer, and play the stream.
12. If you want to save this stream, open Media Player's menu, and go to "Clip", "Add media bookmark..."
13. Edit the name of this bookmark as you'd like.
14. Delete the contents of the "Web address" field (probably something like "http://64.71.145.107:8000").
15. With the blinking, vertical text cursor still in the "Web address" field, paste* the clipboard (the URL you saved earlier) to this field. The field should now contain something like "http://streams.wgbh.org/wgbh.m3u".
16. Tap the "OK" button.

* If you don't know how to paste on your tablet, please ask.

An explanation: You copied and pasted a URL (in this case, "http://streams.wgbh.org/wgbh.m3u") rather than saving the one that was playing in Media Player (in this case, "http://64.71.145.107:8000") because the copied and pasted link is more general. It lets Media Player on your tablet try a few possible servers for the stream and select a working one. Media Player helpfully offered to bookmark the server that worked today, but tomorrow a different server might be working better. The more general link will help avoid that sort of problem.

You should be able to access other Boston stations--as well as stations from DC and LA--in a similar manner. If you run into trouble, please post.

Again on your N800:

1. Open a web browser window and go to www.novaplanet.com.
2. Tap "Ecouter Radio Nova" on the left side of the page.
3. In the page that opens, there's a drop down selection list showing "Windows Media Player". From that list, select "WinAmp, iTunes" instead. Media Player will load, buffer, and play the stream.
4. If you want to save this stream, open Media Player's menu, and go to "Clip", "Add media bookmark..."
5. Edit the name of this bookmark as you'd like.
6. Don't delete or edit the "Web address" this time. This link isn't as specific as in the WGBH example above.
7. Tap the "OK" button.

I listen to KCRW's streams myself, and here's how:

1. Open a web browser window on your N800 and go to KCRW.com.
2. At the very top of the page are three buttons: "Live", "Music", and "News". Tap your favorite.
3. Near the top of the new web browser window that opens in a horizontal band that reads, "Listen in stand-alone". In than band, tap and hold on "iTunes/MP3". In the context menu that opens, select "Copy link location". This will copy the URL of this link to the clipboard. We may want it a little later.
4. Again in the "Listen in stand-alone" band, tap (but don't hold) "iTunes/MP3". Media Player will load, buffer, and play the stream.
5. If you want to save this stream, open Media Player's menu, and go to "Clip", "Add media bookmark..."
6. Edit the name of this bookmark as you'd like.
7. Delete the contents of the "Web address" field (probably something obnoxiously long and/or numeric).
8. With the blinking, vertical text cursor still in the "Web address" field, paste* the clipboard (the URL you saved earlier) to this field. The field should now contain something like "http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwlive.pls".
9. Tap the "OK" button.

* Again, if you don't know how to paste on your tablet, please ask.

As a short cut, here's the general KCRW links you'd wind up pasting if you followed the steps above for each of the three live streams:

• KCRW Live: http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwlive.pls
• KCRW Music: http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwmusic.pls
• KCRW News: http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwnews.pls

In general, for the best results listening to any given station's audio stream with Media Player on your N800, look for two things:

• an option to listen in a stand alone player
• an option to listen to "MP3" or in iTunes, WinAmp, etc.

Other stream types will work, and there's ways of listening to many streams that stations only offer embedded into web pages, but finding one or both of the above things will increase your chances of finding easy success.

If you have questions, or want help with more stations, please post. Thanks!

Betty Woo | # 6 | 2008-02-04, 20:55 | Report

Ah... another good hint to keep in mind. Many thanks!

Wow. I'll have to go back and see if that's what I'd been doing. I was so damned happy I got something to work out that I'm not sure what is in those bookmarks

I'm always surprised when I somehow bump into how to do something to get an end result but then find out the method may not be very efficient

A very succinct explanation. Many thanks. I'll send it ove to the N800 and have it on hand for immediate reference.

krisse | # 7 | 2008-02-05, 03:46 | Report

Sjgadsby, excellent excellent post there, well done. I'd never thought of copying and pasting a more general URL like that, very very very clever.


Betty, regarding the NYtimes.com site, I just tried it and it works absolutely fine on my N800. It loads quickly and looks identical to what I see on my PC browser. If it won't load properly on your N800 and you have the very latest firmware, then there might be something wrong with your tablet. Are you running any other applications at the same time as the browser? If so, which ones?

Regarding the radio stations, I agree it is very unintuitive to add bookmarks to particular audio streams, especially by sjgadsby's ingenious-but-complex method, and I'd strongly recommend casual radio listeners use the directory instead.

Like I said before though, a lot of stations don't want people to listen to them without visiting their website.

It's not so much a conspiracy as just not being in many stations' interest, because they may get a lot of advertising money from website visitors (even the advert-free publicly-funded BBC now has banner ads on its websites if you visit them from outside the UK).

If they get a lot of their funding from website banner ads, why would they make it any easier for people to bypass their website?

krisse | # 8 | 2008-02-05, 04:08 | Report

There are about five BBC bookmarks already on the player, but that doesn't make it any easier to install bookmarks from other BBC stations.

Just because there's a BBC link pre-installed, how does that tell you the method by which it got there?


I'm not quite sure why you regard BBC examples as not being "real world".

The tutorial I did showed a method for getting a bookmark from the standalone player link, and this same method can apply to many non-BBC stations.

The problem with covering other stations is... which ones? If I covered the ones you wanted as well, what about all the others?

I chose the BBC as an example because they're popular, well-known around the world, have a large and consistent set of websites for their stations, and they provide a great mixture of programming (probably a greater mixture than anyone else).


I did actually say in the tutorial text that Realplayer is a good one to choose, but that it's worth trying other formats too. Most stations only have a small number of options (many stations only have one option), so if it really is your favourite it's worth trying them all.

The problem with naming a specific format or formats is that people will think it WILL work, when it won't always work, and you'll still have to do trial and error anyway.

For example the BBC uses Realplayer, so in theory all of their Realplayer standalone links should work on the tablet, and most of them do, but some of them just don't. (I think it has something to do with the redirects they use when you access the stations on a PC.)



As I said in the message above regarding the nytimes.com website, it sounds like you have something wrong with your browser as that site works absolutely fine on my N800.

But if there is a severe problem with the way the browser renders a website, there's not really anything I can say or do about in a tutorial. What can I say?


I think your browser might well be kinky, but there aren't really any expectations other than that the N800 and N810 render the vast majority of websites the same way a PC would. If it doesn't always happen, well, that's the world of portable devices.

The only real expectation is that the site will look the same as on a desktop or laptop computer.

There's no hint or tip that can solve problems with rendering because it's entirely down to small devices with small amounts of resources trying to cleverly render pages that were designed for much bigger machines with much greater resources. Usually they pull it off, sometimes they don't, and that's how it will probably always be because pocket-sized devices will always be behind full-size devices in terms of raw power.

And to be fair, sometimes even my desktop PC can't render a page correctly because it wasn't designed for the browser I'm using.

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Last edited by krisse; 2008-02-05 at 04:18.

Betty Woo | # 9 | 2008-02-05, 04:17 | Report

With Flash on, 39 seconds to load the page to the point where it stops downloading and lagging. Without Flash on, 33 seconds. Without running any other applications.

It's also bizarrely rendered. It looks like it's downloading and looking like it should until the very last thing and then - BaM - the ad boxes get shoved around within the large, mostly vacant New York Times masthead box while the fonted name is dwarfed, the layout (that looked perfect before that last bit was downloaded) gets wonky and the photo that should appear right under the masthead is now suddenly half way down the page, shoved over to the right.

I've got OS2008 version w.w007.50-2.

My iGoogle page is also still flucked with everything below the tabs being shoved 3/4s of the way to the right - making the widgets impossible to read.

However, from reading posts on some of the other threads, slow loading times and wonky layouts don't seem to be particularly rare.

I figure it's gotta be the browser itself since I never have to rebuffer the radio stations and the bluetooth transfers are nice and quick.

It's ironic that my first post would be about getting radio stations since the slowness of the browser is really discouraging me from using the N800 for anything more than a glorified transistor radio at the moment

Still... I got me the most snazzy transistor radio (that can do slow double-duty as a web tablet) in my whole building! WoOoOoO hOoOoOoOo.

Durandal | # 10 | 2008-02-05, 04:22 | Report

I'd just like to add that "m3u" and "pls" aren't streaming formats per se... they're playlists. As Sjgadsby sort of hinted at, they contain a list of one or more servers, which are almost always in mp3 format. A minority of m3u and pls might be stations that stream Ogg Vorbis, AAC, or another audio format, so just looking for pls/m3u isn't guaranteed to give you a working link. Winamp and iTunes can both play AAC (and in Winamp's case, Vorbis, FLAC, and some others), so they aren't great indicators of compatibility either.

That said, 99% of the live audio streams you find on the net are in mp3 format. If you fan find a playlist or mp3 stream link, you should be in good shape.