Beta Release : Mobile Internet Radio

General Lighting

Super Moderator
Staff member
yes, get the direct stream links for the various players from the control panel and publish them.

Be aware most (all?) mobile devices do not play internet radio stations "out of the box"; (encountered this on both Android and Windows Phone) the flash / HTML5 players do not work at all; nor clicking on stream links - and listeners often need to install separate apps such as Deadbeef (for Android) / VLC media player or Raydio (Windows Phone)

Even then clicking from the stream link does not start up the player like it would on a desktop and you have to use various fiddly workarounds.

I have my own suspicions for this; in part a method of big advertising agencies, copyright "feds" and mobile phone operators to try and take back control of online broadcasting; and recover bandwidth costs from a service that competes with other more profitable traffic (such as phone calls).

Nothing to do with the real feds (Communications Ministry) - mobile services are already licensed by them for the radio bit; there are existing laws about what you should and shouldn't do with a telecommunications circuit .

Internet Radio is simply a "one way phone call" with many people calling at once to listen, in most nations there is no law against playing music down the phone provided whoever is at the other end requested it.

In Europe, once someone has established a comms circuit, especially as a broadcaster, the law often states content must not be intercepted, diverted in any form or other content substituted without full agreement and disclosure (both the NSA/GCHQ and the online advertising networks [they operate the same way]] are having issues coping with ;)

Also for "oldsters" like me its pointless putting silly small ads (or anything else) on the screen; for us radios make sound with perhaps a RDS type display or a few lines of text; if I want to look at pictures I'd watch television :rofl:; and I might even want to use the device for the quaint old fashioned concept of making a telephone call but still want the radio in the background..

I'm also strongly against any ap/ad delivery network that encourages folk to walk in the streets (or worse, ride bicycles or drive cars) looking at their device instead of the road; keeping it in a pocket and listening on headphones at a sensible volume (or loudspeakers in cars) is fine. There's a good chance that if one of your listeners does get in a crash; the mobile device's internal chips may well survive an impact that the owner doesn't; and data (including what they were listening to) can still be recovered from them!

OTOH (at least in UK) mobile devices and SIMS with generous data bundles are both cheap; its not unfeasible to carry two devices; one for listening to the radio with and another for using for other communications. I've done this with an old HTC (which even survived falling out of my pocket into the Norwich Road; chapeau! to the rest of the cyclists who helped me recover it; it still works even though the accu got run over at least once)...

Easiest way IMO to deal with all this is for all of us to share on here what are the best "all stations" player apps for each mobile device and then we can add our links to their directories.
 
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Support

Level 1 Support
Staff member
Is there a way to generate a direct page link to our particular channel?

GoHamRadio- Do you even GoHam bro? - Internet Radio

I'd like to be able to link our station across social media directly instead of explaining to people where to find us in the list of genres.

Thanks

If you did want to share your station normally on Facebook etc, just use one of the following URL's:

http://www.internet-radio.com/station/gohamradio
http://uk1.internet-radio.com:15938/listen.pls

For the mobile version, we did provide some links and information on how to create QR codes on the first page of the thread.

You can simply provide 2 QR Codes (one for Android / Symbian and one for iPhone / Blackberry) so users can tune in that way. On the mobile version of the site we run some code which detects the useragent of the browser and then serves up a link compatible with the device so it can tune in. For iPhones / Blackberry the native PLS is fine and allows tuning in without any extra apps installed. For Android / Symbian we run a proxy which changes the stream so it can be tuned in without the need for any extra apps.

We have a lot of major updates to our website planned in the coming months as well. Amongst these is likely a new HTML5 player which will playback your stream (and others) on such devices without the need for any apps etc. ;)

We hope this helps.
 

General Lighting

Super Moderator
Staff member
dates to our website planned in the coming months as well. Amongst these is likely a new HTML5 player which will playback your stream (and others) on such devices without the need for any apps etc. ;)

that would be excellent (as whatever the other ones are do not work reliably on all the range of mobile devices around today; but the (presumably HTML5 based) players that TuneIn and Radionomy use do.
 

Support

Level 1 Support
Staff member
that would be excellent (as whatever the other ones are do not work reliably on all the range of mobile devices around today; but the (presumably HTML5 based) players that TuneIn and Radionomy use do.

The current player is flash based. That's the one we intend to replace with a HTML5 player ;)

We are not sure what Tunein or Radionomy use to be honest? Never really looked into it.
 

General Lighting

Super Moderator
Staff member
just tried it; worked straight out of the box (had to think to click on the (=) box (but with 3 lines) to get the search bit. My only suggestion would be to alllow links for multiple mountpoints for Icecast users (so my mobile listeners could select the 96K AAC rather than 192k MP3 stream)
 

More Support

Level 2 Support
Staff member
just tried it; worked straight out of the box (had to think to click on the (=) box (but with 3 lines) to get the search bit. My only suggestion would be to alllow links for multiple mountpoints for Icecast users (so my mobile listeners could select the 96K AAC rather than 192k MP3 stream)

Great. Our testing went well too. We're seeing an increase of 27% more visitors from mobile & tablet users in the analytics.

I've heard it referred to the "hamburger" menu.

Multiple links will eventually come when we update the start pages next. The plan is to offer the last player tracks and move to an ajax model for the currently playing song data to ensure both are up to date. As its stands, right now, the data is polled every 3 minutes.
 
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