Every year about this time I revamp my “online audio streaming” for UT Football. John Ward forever spoiled me on Radio Football, and when I was living far away from Tennessee my only source for UT games was the internet. Now, I pipe online broadcast games through my HOM (Home, Office and Mobile) media setup, so that no mater where I am, I can be assured that I have access to “Football time in Tennessee”, even if I’m on the far side of the world.
Because radio stations change, I have to update my HOM Media system periodically to make sure I have a good source for the Audio. Fortunately UT Athletics publishes a list of radio station in their “Vol Radio Network” at:
http://www.utsports.com/ot/radio.html
I start by going down this list and Googleing the call sign for each station and looking at their website. If you ever want a real tour-de-force of badly coded, web 1.0 sites, try looking up small town radio station on the Internet. Only a hand full of the station offer any form of 24/7 streaming, and of those that do, only a few offer streaming that is not tied to a web browser plugin. There is a further complication in that all these stations are supposed to “blackout” UT games from being broadcast on the Internet (stupid copyright issue). Fortunately if you peal back the web-browser plugin and get straight to the audio source, most of these stations continue to stream during the game. Their ideal of a “blackout” is to remove the link from their home page.
To be compatible with my HOM media setup, I need stations that stream in MP3. Of the stations in the list I found 3 that stream in MP3, WCRK, WKWX, WGSQ.
Only WCRK has a straight up MP3 stream located at http://216.77.168.247:85/broadwave.mp3
WKWX and WGSQ Use Live365 to broadcast. Live365 does offer MP3 Streams, but you have to dig them out of the embedded web player. I choose to use WGSQ for my primary stream source at http://www.live365.com/play/358517 and then have WCRK as a backup. WGSQ is located in nearby in Cookeville, so ancillary stuff to the broadcast will be more relevant to me.
My HOM media setup is based around iTunes, so all I needed to do was from within iTunes click on “Advanced” then “Open Audio Stream”, paste the URL http://www.live365.com/play/358517 and click “Ok”. iTunes starts playback, but it will also create an icon in the music list automatically so you can click on that icon when you want to play the stream again.
The final step was to adjust my AppleScript automation for the game dates and times for the 2010 season. Now when the pre-show starts, my HOM media setup starts piping out all that Tennessee Football goodness.
