Howto use Amarok to play BBC Radio stations over the internet

**Nerderello** · 12-13-2006

The BBC transmits all of its Radio broadcasts as Real Player streams over the internet. It also transmits some (its core stations) in a format suitable for Windows media player. These stations can be played through Amarok.

Open up Amamrok, and open the Playlists (vertical button on the left hand side of the player). Now add the BBC radio station to the Radio Streams limb of the Playlist tree, by right clicking on it (ie. right click on the words Radio Stream) and select Add Radio Station.

In the popup box, put the name of the name of the station, and in the URL field put:

Code:

Radio 1
mms://wmlive-acl.bbc.co.uk/wms/radio1/radio1_nb_e1s1
Radio 2
mms://wmlive-acl.bbc.co.uk/wms/radio2/radio2_nb_e1s1
Radio 3
mms://wmlive-acl.bbc.co.uk/wms/radio3/radio3_nb_e1s1
Radio 4
mms://wmlive-acl.bbc.co.uk/wms/radio4/radio4_nb_e1s1

The click on Okay.

To play, all you have to do is select (double click) the Radio station from your playlist (it'll be below the Cool-Streams listing), and then press play.

You may wonder where I got the odd looking addresses from, well, if you look at the source of the BBC web pages that allow you select Real Player or Windows Media player, you'll see (way down in the code) that it accesses a second file called (for Radio 2) http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/wm_asx/aod/radio2.asx . And if you look in there you'll see a number (four) of addresses. I simply chose the first.

have fun

Nerderello

**bigtomrodney** · 12-14-2006

Dude!

Sweet! Cheers for that, I'll be checking that out later. I had been looking for a few more net stations.

**bigtomrodney** · 12-17-2006

Right well I have the streams added, but it's complaining about

No suitable input plugin. This often means that the url's protocol is not supported. Network failures are other possible causes.
Radio 1 mms://wmlive-acl.bbc.co.uk/wms/radio1/radio1_nb_e1s1

I can play wma and any other formats. I wonder is it the mms slave that's causing trouble. Any ideas?

I'm using Amarok 1.4.4 on SUSE 10.2 with Packman's xine.

**ryptyde** · 12-19-2006

I tried it and had the same message that bigtomrodney had appear in Amarok so I went to the Real Player site Real_Player_Linux grabbed the rpm and installed it opened Amarok then clicked on the station and hit play and it worked.

**phildin** · 01-03-2007

For anyone who wants to access BBC7, you can use the URL

mms://wmlive.bbc.co.uk/wms/bbc7/lo_s1

Regards,
-phil

**hippysurfer** · 04-20-2007

**joemoer** · 10-04-2007

Hey Hippysurfer thanks for the post. I tried out your links as I kept on getting errors for the stream links above. Yours appear to work but I get no sound - The track timer in Amarok is ticking away as if it's playing something but I don't hear a sound. I'm pretty sure I have every codec under the sun installed. Anyone got any ideas? It's driving me mad as I'm living in the Netherlands and I like listening to radio 4 when ever I feel a bit homesick

**ryptyde** · 10-15-2007

I can also listen to the the links posted by hippysurfer from FF with the MPlayer plug-in for mozilla.

**joemoer** · 10-18-2007

Hooray! I just installed Mandriva 2008 and it works!! I'm not sure why it didn't work in 2007 soring as I did exctlt the same things and have all the same codecs installed. But it works anyway so I'm not complaining.

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