Yet Another Internet Radio Player

Tis the season to be jolly... and one for producing these confounded Internet Radio Players, it seems.

I don't usually have the patience to write a full application, but I managed to drag out the energy to spend a little over a week creating this thing.

I called it RadioBaH, since I cannot afford to pay for someone to think of a name for me.
It is just a basic Shoutcast and Icecast player, originally written to test out some of my BlitzMax modules (they tend to begin with BaH. ...).
But, something went wrong, and it turned into an application that I actually use all the time now (I know.. what were the chances of that!?).

It doesn't do much else other than play radio. Actually, it doesn't do anything else, other than play radio. You can search for channels, save up to 7 favourites, and add non-listed custom channels that you find elsewhere.

So, here it is. I've gone to the trouble of knocking out a webpage for it too, which you can reach here.

Oh, and a little screenshot :



Exciting, isn't it?

It has issues, but it doesn't mind how sensitive your mouse is (or isn't) ...

Radio BaHBaH? :)

Crinkly £10's and £20's greatly received.

Good one GFK. Now I've got that damnable Queen song stuck in my head.

Remind me to sing the Annoying Frog ringtone at you when we meet someday.

On-topic: downloaded just because it's by Brucey and it might let me listen to Slay Radio.

(For the record, it did. A nice lil unbloated app for when I don't feel like firing up all of Winamp)

I love this little thing. Fits my needs perfectly. Thank you!!!

ps: I'd love to skin it :)

Looking nice.
As it's beta I found a bug when trying to search (under Find/Channel) and hit enter or click search, the program quits without any message. (using XP SP2)

It would be great if I could preview a station when selecting it in the search window without having to load it up (loading a station makes the search window disappear).

Theres a option in the settings to disable the "hide on select" feature. Disabling it means that when you double-click, the window stays open.


Every time? For any search?

Ack my bad. Maybe uncheck those by default? Just my opinion.

ps: thanks again for this little sucker :)

Yes, every time!?

I suppose my first guess is that your firewall is blocking net access for it.
Is there a list of genres?

Of course, I probably need to add more "null" checks for such cases - rather than having it self-nuke.. :-)

No problem here. I got a long list of genres. I can select them and play the music. Also the filter in genres works fine, just the channel search lets the program quit.

Let me preface this by saying this is something I would never use due to not having a need for this type of program.

That said, I really like this. The design is intuitive, it looks really nice and to me the greatest thing is it was made using several of your modules. It really showcases your hard work. It has me wanting to figure out how to use the Cairo mod for my own projects.

The only downside I found with this, is it is a bit of a processor hog (compared to streaming something in an old version of WINAMP).

Again, I do like this and I think the UI is gorgeous.

If you "hide" it, CPU drops off the charts. It's only because it's doing all that scrolly/bouncy nonsense that it eats the CPU a bit.
I tend to have mine hidden anyway... ;-)


I dunno about that... but it's the first proper App I've made for aeons.

...and now I remember why! It's great fun for the first few days... but then it all gets a bit tedious... tinker here, tinker there... oh, bugger... I've still got *that bit* to implement... tinker... *sigh*...

How anyone can spend several MONTHS on one project.. I have no idea!! I'd go off my head.
(still, it's still not as bad has having to document modules...)

Updated with new Italian and Spanish localisations. Thanks to Manel (es) and Christian (it) for those :-)

You can now double-click on the volume button to toggle Mute on/off. Thanks to Russ for the suggestion :-)

Maybe something is broken in new version. I can't get it to work. I downloaded the newest version of bass and the only thing I get is language selection and no matter what I select it doesn't go further.

cheers
Roman

Hey, you are right... You'd think I'd run it once before releasing, huh?

Well, it should be okay now :-)

You're not the only one though ;-)

It's okey now.

Really nice player. How about this feature:

"holding down on a preset button for a few seconds sets it to the current station"

Much like you do with a car stereo

Great stuff.

Could you get rid of the "crackling sounds" in the background when playing most stations?

I don't hear any crackling on any of the 128kbps stations that I listen to - either on Mac or XP (native or via Parallels).
Actually, neither on the much lower bitrate streams either - except they all sound like they are being played from the next room. (excluding AAC+ of course, which streams well at 64kbps).

Maybe it's a BASS issue :-)

I do hear glitches from time to time too.

Strange.. never had this before.

There is a repeated dip on some stations, where it basically cuts off for a split second (noticed just now with a 128kbps stream, on ShoutCast).
It's probably the station just getting pummeled by data requests, because it's playing fine now.

Me neither.

I've noticed that some stations have trouble feeding me the data fast enough... which sometimes eventually means the audio stops altogether. So yes, there may be issues at the server-end.

I suppose I could increase the buffer sizes. Maybe that is an issue on some PCs.

The sound issues under XP are a Bass issue.
With Fmod the same stations run fine. - Simple as that.

Do you happen to have a URL to play with please?

Thanks :-)

Sure.

Puls Radio, http://194.158.114.68:5000, streaming at 192kb/s.

I've now added some Setup options which allow you to bump up the playback buffer from the default 500ms (up to 5000). It's possible that 500ms is too small for some PCs/soundcards.
Also updated to the latest BASS DLLs, which may (or may not) help.

Anyhoo... if that doesn't sort it out... oh well :-)
You have a very capable little player anyway! And there are a million other players out there already.

FMOD doesn't do AAC+ streams, so it's a no-go for me, given the superior quality of AAC+ at lower bitrates. I'd rather have the support more audio formats.

Still, it's nice to tinker with all these things, and see what one can do with it.

Thanks for trying.

Btw: I wouldn't translate "Power" with "Kraft" in German.
No one uses this word in the field of electronics.
"Power" or "An/Aus" i.e. "On/Off" would be better imho.

My tiny player has a different audience.