Radio/Real Player

[alan]

I used to listen to the radio whilst i was on the computer (through the computer !) but you have to use Real Player,its suppose to be dodgy and uses alot of spyware etc,so I deleted it,does anyone know of a alternative program to use as it was always crystal clear,heard theres one called Winamp !

[bribones]

http://www.winamp.com/

had it on the pc for a while alan although i only ever use it to play files

sounds ok lol :P

[Edited on 18/4/2005 by bribones]

[alan]

Cheers Bri I\'ll give it a go,did you use the Pro version

[bribones]

just downloaded the full free version without the bundle ,i updated it today to version 5.08

[alan]

still wont work on BBC stations though ! asks for Real Player

[mark]

try iTunes. the best MP3 archiving/ripping/burning/playing thing and has a big library of web radio statiions inbuilt, covering most genres of music

Ok its an apple product but it does work in windows too, and its completely free

http://apple.com

[alan]

thanks Mark nice one

[Chris_Hughes]

In the early days of internet radio broadcasting by the BBC (about 5 years ago), the transmission worked with various media players incuding Microsofts player (whatever it was at that time). But I think there was some kind of licensing/legal problem with the codec (compression) the BBC where using for the broadcasting. The outcome was that they had to stop broadcasting with a codec that was universal and which many players could use and move to a codec that only real player could decode, a backwards step. But why after 5 years are they still using a system that only works with Real Player ?

[mark]

little know fact but the BBC site is authored using something called apple web objects, and hence is served via apple powered servers, a combination of sun workstations and apple x-serves, but of whic are running the web objects server software. Now the strange thing that has always puzzled me with this set up at the bben is, that as they have all the apple server software why they don\'t adopt quicktime, as they already own an unlimited client licence for it as a streaming server, everyone has QT already, the quality is brill, and it gives a huge number of possibilities of what they can do with it (listen to some of the radio stations in iTunes to get an idea of radio quality or watch some of the QT channels that are preinstalled with the QT player to get an idea)

my theory is that its an issue of bandwidth, which in the older (er) days was more limited so maybe thats why they went down the Real Player route, maybe they\'ll change, maybe they wont!