Listen to UK Radio

If you’re into shouty impotence adverts, the same 10 shitty tracks played in endless rotation and ‘banter’ the like of which you won’t hear outside a jail cell for the mentally restricted, then you’ll love radio in Australia. Personally speaking I enjoy the output produced by decent radio stations – mainly, but not exclusively, those run by the BBC. Call me a snob if you want, but I defy anyone to listen to a commercial radio station in this country for more than 10 minutes without slicing their ears off with a blunt spatula.

Now the good news on this front is that UK radio is more widely available than the telly. In order to listen to any of the BBC stations, just point your browser at the iPlayer website and listen live to any station you like. You can also use the superb ‘Listen Again’ facility to catch up on anything you missed. The BBC sites use Real Player for audio playback, codecs for which are available for Windows, Linux and OSX – so everyone can join in the fun.

But let’s say you’d like to record some of the BBC’s shows and listen to them on your iPod. I like to record BBC shows and put them on my iPod which I use in my car – journeys go quickly when you have a decent program to listen to. Your options for recording Internet radio vary depending upon your operating system.

Windows
As usual there are about a zillion applications that claim to record Internet radio for Windows users. Some of them might even be half decent. However very few of them are capable of recording BBC radio – in fact the only solution I found that worked properly was Total Recorder.

Total Recorder isn’t simply an Internet radio recorder, but a full blown audio recording package that happens to be very good at recording radio streams. Word of warning though – it’s not a one-click solution. You can, however, find an excellent tutorial on recording radio streams here. Given that you can actually schedule recordings, it’s a lot more sophisticated than most of these programs which require you to press the record button at the appropriate moment.

With many of these streaming audio recording programs, you need to find out what the underlying URL of the audio file is. This isn’t always easy – some broadcasters obscure it to protect their broadcasts. However you can find out the url easily enough with a program like URL Snooper which sniffs out the URLs behind the streams.
OSX
What Mac users lose in terms of quantity is usually more than made up for in terms of quality – and that’s no different in this niche area of the software market. There are lots of solutions for listening to and/or recording Internet radio but there are two stand-out programs that are well worth checking out.

iRecordMusic might have a clunky name, but it’s a very nicely put together application that can record audio output from pretty much any radio station. To use it, you just navigate to the audio stream in question using the built-in browser and then hit the record button. Scheduling is taken care of via integration with iCal – you can do one-offs or regular recordings in a wide variety of formats.

The best radio recorder I’ve ever used on any platform, however, is RadioShift. With this program I can schedule any radio show to record with a couple of clicks of the mouse. The software uses a full PVR style listing so you can search for a particular show and add it as a favourite.

I have all my favourite radio shows listed as favourites and the software records them all with no intervention from me. When I get up in the morning, I plug my iPod in and it syncs all those broadcasts automatically. There’s quite simply no better streaming radio software on the market – I’d go as far as saying it’s worth getting a Mac for.

If you don’t want to record anything, just be reminded when a particular program’s on, then Steam is your best bet. It’ll pop you up a little reminder telling you that a program you like is about to start and you can listen to the show through the application.

And if you just want to listen to BBC radio with the minimum of fuss, then Phantom Gorllia’s superb Dashboard widget is all you’ll need. The BBC Radio Widget lets you tune in to any station with no fuss – it’ll even show you timezone adjusted listings for forthcoming shows.

Linux
As always in the wonderful world of Linux, things aren’t as simple as for Windows and OSX users. In fact recording internet audio streams on Linux is a perfect example of why this OS is not ready to be unleashed on the average home punter. You can find a good tutorial on the art of recording streams here. There’s also a bit of software called Streamripper which attempts to simplify the whole process – but I couldn’t get it working – your mileage may vary. You could also go for the belt and braces technique where you just dump the output from mplayer to an .rm file for later playback.

Listening to Internet Radio
Of course the big problem with Internet radio is that it kind of locks you in to listening to it in front of your computer. As I’ve explained above, you can record those shows and transfer them onto your iPod, but that doesn’t have to be the only outlet. If you’ve got an old PC lying about then there’s nothing to stop you reformatting the hard drive, putting a stripped down operating system (Ubuntu or XP) on it and using it as a media centre. Admittedly an old PC will struggle with BluRay playback, but for playing Internet radio it’ll be fine. All you need is a solid internet connection and output from the soundcard to your home stereo or surround sound system.

If you don’t want anything as clunky as a PC in your living room – and you don’t want to spend the cash on a bespoke media centre PC, then an Internet Radio’s a good option. These are ordinary looking radios that come equipped with a Wi-fi card that’s capable of piggybacking onto your wireless internet connection and broadcasting Internet radio – there’s a good explaination and reviews of three of them here.

If you’re an Austar or Foxtel subscriber then you might like to know that you can get one BBC channel via satellite already. The BBC World Service broadcast on the ‘Air’ radio channel on Austar and it won’t cost you a penny to hear above and beyond what you’re already forking out. If you’ve never listened to the World Service then don’t be put off – it has excellent programmes (many of which are from Radio 4) and regular news bulletins.

Life Beyond the Beeb
Of
course radio doesn’t begin and end with the BBC’s line-up – there are other radio stations out there that are worth listening to. For instance I’m into ‘doof doof’ dance music and I regularly tune into Kiss 100‘s audio stream to listen to DJ mixes. Shoutcast is a service pioneered by the people behind the popular Windows media player Winamp. There’s some first-rate radio on there, whatever your taste in music. Live365 has some great programmes on there too – you can sign up to get your shows ad-free.

For a complete list of commercial, public and amateur Internet radio stations, look here.