Sports talk WKNR/850 lost its live Internet streaming feed - when the relationship between the Salem Cleveland station and long-time website provider SportsTalkCleveland.com soured last year, and STC backed out of the joint venture.
Tonight, a message board post alerted us to the return of the WKNR live streaming feed via the station's own site at WKNR.com. We're listening to it right now, and it sounds fine.
But...it took a while for us to get it going.
The station is using MP3 streaming, but directly clicking on the "Listen Live" link did not work for us this early morning. Our primary browser, Firefox 1.5 for Windows XP, is set up to load embedded QuickTime when we click on an .MP3 extension link. It yielded the WKNR feed, but only for about 10 seconds. We couldn't even get that much out of Internet Explorer 6...it tried to load the link and failed.
The only way we could get it to work was by copying and pasting the URL underneath the "Listen Live" link into WinAmp's "Open URL" menu option. The same method worked with Windows Media Player 10 as well. But we had to do it outside the browser, both in Firefox and Internet Explorer.
We're not professional webmasters here, but we believe the direct link being a filename ending in "MP3" is a no-no for live streaming audio, probably for the reasons we encountered above.
But we won't aim our barbs at WKNR or Salem just yet, as we don't know if it's mostly a configuration issue for us, or if they really should change the link to a ".pls" (playlist) file - which automatically invokes WinAmp or WMP 10 instead of assuming that there's a single MP3 file underneath the link.
For an example of the way we believe it SHOULD be done, visit the website of legendary ABC talk KGO/810 in San Francisco and its "Listen Live" page. The MP3 stream on that page is a link to a ".pls" playlist file...which launches WinAmp on our soon-to-be-sold laptop and launches KGO's live stream with no problem...
Thursday, March 09, 2006
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2 comments:
I was trying to listen to the Northern Illinois-Toledo MAC Tournament game from Quicken Loans Arena today, and it was untolerable! Mike Catan and Josh Sabo sounded like a pair of 5th grade cheerleaders talking into a tape recorder screaming about the play at the local grade school gym.
How many times was Josh Sabo going to say (very excitedly, by the way), that so-and-so missed a "bunny". Then he repeat the same sentence, re-using the "bunny" instead of "shot", "attempt", "lay-up", or any other of a millions adjectives regarding a missed field goal.
It was so painful, I actually tuned in to the Joe Finan joke a few times.
Note to Josh: It's the Mid-American Conference. It's not life or death. Relax. Tell us, the listeners, what is happening on the court, sans the fluff and high-pitched excitement in your voice. Take a pill if you have to, because I love having the games available on WKNR, but please help me decipher the actions; don't contribute to it.
PLEASE, WKNR....
Solve the problem described in this original post. I wanted to listen live on my computer, as well, and could not get the station to work, when I clicked "Listen Live." And I really didn't understand what the suggestion (in this post) was telling me to do. It shouldn't be that HARD, should it?? I mean, if you have a button that says "Listen Live," make it happen, man.
Also, contrary to the comment above, I don't mind Mike and Josh at all (in my limited listening, on radio). They're better than what we've heard in prior days. Greg Brinda is still the very best WKNR has to offer, bar none.
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