Can I play a Live365 stream to my parcel?

I've been trying to stream a Live365 radio station to my parcel. (It's not a station that I run, just one that I like.) I've searched the forums, googled, and experimented, but I am having no success at all.

I've tried opening the radio station in iTunes (I'm on a Mac), taking the URL out, and pasting it in the Media options of my land. Sometimes that works, but mostly I get a very patient voice asking me to log in ("it's free, and it's secure," he says encouragingly). The URL seems to have a session ID tag which makes me think this might not be possible.

Has anyone been able to do this?

Yes, its possible. I recommend that you sign up as a premium listener as well as a station owner, or your visitors to your land will here a very long (annoying) live365 commercial. There is a session ID tag which means the URL will expire. Sometimes it goes for days, sometimes hours. I used to just open my radio station from the website & copy/paste the URL to SL. Hope this helps.

DNA

It can indeed be done. Mine seems to work best when I am live, but the automatic stream does work too, just cuts out occasionally. In contrast to DNA, I have had the same URL for at least 8 months

Mine can be heard out on my sim - Asim Zahra

Cutter

Here's how - I don't do Live365 any more, so the language may not be perfect.

First, make sure you have the free WinAMP player installed, and then go to the www.live365.com site stream you're trying to access.

(1) Go to Live365 and log in to your account if you have one.

(2) Go to the SETTING / SET UP / CONFIG page.

(3) Click the setting (I forget exactly what its called) saying to use an EXTERNAL player instead (WinAMP) instead of the default in-browser Live365 plug-in.

(4) Go back to the stream, and click to play again. It should fire up in WinAMP this time.

(5) On the marquee in the WinAMP player, right click and go to PROPERTIES. This will pop open a window - copy the "URL" field (http://.......) and paste that into the Music URL in Second Life.

That should do it!

Regards,

-Flip

I'm in the same boat as Hillary Melville. I've read about the Winamp route before, unfortuately this is not available to me. I have tried a number of different streams using iTunes. I get the url, plug it into the media option for my land, and get nothing. I've run out of ideas and have pretty much come to a wall on this. Any Mac-centric suggestions will be appreaciated.

I am in the process of making an SL centric solution (i.e. you don't have to muck with external programs/websites at all)... Hopefully I'll have it fully working soon.

Goto www.shoutcast.com or use the built in radio list and select a station wait for it to start playing then click file and get info, In the summary section under "Where" will be the url, you can click "edit url" and click edit > copy then paste it into sl's land menu

Sorry for those in the locked-in world of iTunes - I pity thee! Its a shame Apple didn't leave options more open in their player - its very sexy, otherwise.

Another option would be to contact any of the in-game streaming services if you wish to stream yourself - their rates are much better than Live365 and they don't force you to doodle around their web site.

Regards,

-Flip

If you dig Live365, go to their website and listen from there, not through Itunes. You're only getting a tiny fraction of the available stations that way (the biggest and generally most commercial) and you don't get the better, smalller, more diverse stations (like mine!).

When I feel like having my L365 station on my land I listen in winamp with my premium account so there's no commercials and relay it through shoutcast. That way L365 only sees it as a single connection. If you put the url for a basic L365 stream on your land with the login and password included in the URL, everyone who enters your parcel and plays your stream will be seen by L365 as a seperate IP connecting with the same user name and password. That's not a good thing.

LOL Chip. I don't 'dig' Live365 per se. It's just there's a stream there that I'd love to stream on my parcel. (http://www.live365.com/stations/sirensofsong if anyone really wants to know; no it's not my station, just one I like.)

It sounds like you're using a Shoutcast server to rebroadcast the L365 stream, but that requires that your computer be on, and the more guests you have over, the more bandwidth you need. I was trying to avoid exactly those two things. (And I'm not even going to touch on how certain music industry groups might feel about that :)

Anyway, it seems I'm out of luck as long as Live365 wants the URLs to uniquely identify each player.

That's unfortunate, since otherwise they offer the general kind of service I'm looking for when and if I decide to have my own station: unattended operation, live (relay) streaming, and licensing. But as long as the unattended operation is incompatible with SL, I'll have to keep looking.

Thank you to everyone for all the help.

Yep, it's against the rules, but at least doing it that way royalties are still being paid to the artists. Since my Shoutcast server only allows ten connections I think of it as being no different than having ten friends over at my house while I have L365 playing on my stereo. If I just threw the same playlist up in winamp and shoutcasted it, it would be completely illegal



The need for listeners to log in to L365 and launch stations from their station pages is a requirement of their deal with the RIAA. You might want to check out their new broadcasting package they just introduced called X5000. It requires an annual contract (2k I believe) but listeners don't have to log in (AFAIK) and the streams don't have to be launched from the L365 site. It's too expensive for me since my station only has a half dozen regular listeners.

The small subset of L365 stations available through iTunes, Tivo, and other places are made possible by seperate RIAA deals. Sirens of Song is a great station. I can understand why you'd want to stream it to your land

Just to clarify, we Mac users aren't locked out of the rich smorgasbord of music that Live365 has to offer. You can select any station, and Mr Safari will pass a .pls file off to Mr iTunes, who will be more than happy to play the music for you :).

Oh, and Chip, I agree with you. When I'm streaming my music to half a dozen friends in my SL house, I think of exactly the same way: as if I've invited them to my RL house and played music for them while we engage in witty banter about the passing scene.

Oh, gotya. They also list some stations directly in iTunes without having to go to the L365 site. Same list shown on Tivo and a few other places. I forgot you could use it as your default player. When I'm just listening and not relaying I play it with their own player software. Seems to sound best that way