I like to listen to radio, but the PC is on anyway and there’s no hifi around I listen to it on the PC also. I would listen, because some radio stations are not Winamp-friendly and base their streaming on Windows Media Player (WMP), and don’t provide a link to a PLS file or something like this…
One of the stations I listen to a lot has moved to another server or something like that, and while I managed to extract the link to the stream Winamp rewarded me with a “error synching to stream” error message only. Opening the same URL in WMP worked fine. After searching a bit I learned that Winamp can’t figure out the stream format (MP3, WMA, etc) and hence the error message. Winamp uses the file extension as the base. The solution is pretty obvious since Winamp seems to the pretty dumb and only look at the end of the URL to decide the format. While media servers don’t care much about extra bits at the end of the URL, like a GET parameter list, and provide the stream nonetheless, all I had to do is suffix the URL with ?.wma and Winamp starts playing happily… Why I can’t think of such a solutions myself?!?!?! How did someone come up with this solutions?!?!! 🙂