One of the neat things about Pocket Tunes is it's ability to play streaming audio from the internet. The place I use this most is to listen to radio stations using Shoutcast feeds. This is pretty simple to do, but how about Live365 stations?
If you want to listen to a Shoutcast station all you have to do is use the Treo browser, or browser in your Tungsten C or Lifedrive, to go to the Shoutcast site. You then click on the station you want to hear and the browser will download a playlist to your SD card. You can then open this in Pocket Tunes and listen. Unfortunately, Live365 doesn't work like this. The Palm browser, or Xiino, if you use that one, can't handle Live365. So what do you do?
It took a while for me to figure this out, but the following works and enables me to get Live365 streamed to my Treo. All of the following takes place on your computer. First, go to Live365 and set the MP3 player options to MP3 Player. You can find this under Listen Settings. Then, go to a station you want and click on the Play icon. Your browser will now ask you if you want to download a playlist file. Say yes, and put it someplace you can get to it.
Next, go to the playlist file and open it with a text editor. You will see a string of characters like this: File1=http://www.live365.com/play/304867?LID=501-usa&lid=501-usa&SaneID=65.216.158.130-
1127403638207&AuthType=NORMAL&VisitCount=10&bitrate=256&now=1127411865790&pid=1120
Open Pocket Tunes and go to Open/Internet Audio/New. You will see a dialog asking you to enter a url. From the string above take everything starting with "http" and finishing at the number after "play". For example, in this string you would use www.live365.com/play/304867 and enter it.
The url you just entered will now appear when you hit Open/Internet Audio, and it will stream just fine. There may be quicker or easier ways to do this, but this is the only way I've been able to get it to work. If anybody has a better method, or other advice on streaming audio from the internet, please post it in the forum topic I've opened there.
- Paul Biba, Associate Writer (Bernardsville, NJ USA)
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