Online Radio With Mplayer

[Dronecatcher]

I often have internet radio on in the background when I'm on my Mac and whilst iTunes is great at doing that I wondered if there was a more economical way of achieving the same....enter Mplayer.
This is the syntax for playing internet radio through Mplayer (when installed in Applications):

Home$ /Applications/mplayer -quiet -playlist http://somafm.com/u80s.pls

Just paste in your chosen station URL.

To avoid having to type all that in each time, I made an alias - so to play this station all I have to do is type "u80" into Terminal.

To make a permanent alias, edit your .bash_profile (either in your Home or etc folder) - here is the text I added for my example:

alias u80=' /Applications/mplayer -quiet -playlist http://somafm.com/u80s.pls'

The alias will be set next time you log in or can be loaded immediately by:

Home$ . ~/.bash_profile

Mplayer parses the playlist which Terminal then gives you the current track info.

Here it is running on my iBook - it's not often you can browse the web (Lynx), listen to streaming radio and run a system monitor (Top) all at under 10% CPU.....

 

[eyoungren]

I might suggest Snowtape 1.5.6 as another internet radio streaming app as well.

The page is in German, but if you click on the download link for the 1.x version you WILL get the English version of the app.

Apparently the German page of the site still has the download while the English page does not.

 

[Dronecatcher]

I might suggest Snowtape 1.5.6 as another internet radio streaming app as well.

The page is in German, but if you click on the download link for the 1.x version you WILL get the English version of the app.

Apparently the German page of the site still has the download while the English page does not.

Thanks, I hadn't heard of that one

 

[eyoungren]

Thanks, I hadn't heard of that one

I have it on my Quicksilver and PowerBook.

Unlike iTunes it's strictly for streaming internet radio and it does a decent job of it with minimal CPU hit.

The downside is it runs around $20.