Radio and streaming

[You may want to skip to the end of this post if you're not a boring geek like me!]

I'm at an awkward stage in my life. I'm far too old to listen to Radio 1 and not old enough to listen to Radio 2 fulltime. When Mark and Lard left Radio 1 I really had nothing left to listen to it for. Radcliffe's starting his Radio 2 show next week - the graveyard shift, same as what he used to do with Lard on Radio 1 nine years back (when I first heard them), which will be nice... except now I'm 9 years older and don't listen to the radio in the evening. Lard - now back to being Marc Riley - has an excellent show on digital radio station 6Music on Saturday afternoons called Rocket Science, but here's another problem: I don't tend to be near my satelite box or a PC on Saturday afternoons, and I don't have a DAB radio in my car or anything.

Fortunately, as far as Rocket Science goes, I can listen during the week on the BBC's On Demand thingy. It's Real Player, which is a bit smelly, and they try and force you to use their web-based player thing to listen, which would be fine if I wanted a bleedin' webpage open for hours... anyway, I peeked at the source of the web player and discovered references to .rpm files - in my world that's a RedHat Package Manager file for Linux software, but Real have hijacked the extension for their own nefarious means. These are the modern version of their .ram files of yesteryear - they're text files that hold the URL of a media stream. When you install Real Player it does all kinds of MIME type trickery to make these open in the Real Player plugin, hiding the info inside. No help for me though, cos I want to bookmark these streams for WinAmp. Anyway, whereas Mozilla and IE obey the MIME type strictly, opening the .rpm in Lynx under Linux causes it to spill the stream URL across your terminal. One copy and paste later, and I have a few URLs that you can bookmark and 'that'. No more webpage nastiness.

ANYWAY. Here's the URLs for a few BBC streams. You might find them useful. They're in no particular order (bar the order I happened to copy and paste in). If Radcliffe's show turns up on the On Demand player, I'll add that as well.

Radio 2 (Live stream)
Radio 1 (Live stream)
6Music (Live stream)
Rocket Science with Marc Riley (Last Saturday's show)
Jonathan Ross (until Radcliffe's on, this is the best show on Radio 2 - this is last Saturday's)