Sitting in my flat in an almost snowless Germany, I decided to save my iPhone's battery and listen to Radio 6 on my laptop instead. Linux has been getting better and better, and the Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala release is so usable that I haven't booted into Windows for a couple of months. So how difficult could it be to play a BBC internet radio stream? Not too hard, as it turns out, but a bit of effort is required...
The simple way is to fire up your favourite browser (Firefox is mine), click to bbc.co.uk/radio select the station you want and click Listen Live. Up pops the BBC iPlayer window and away you go. But that was too easy...
Ubuntu comes with a standalone musicplayer, Rhythmbox, which I thought would be a better bet. This proved a bit more challenging. A quick search with the ubiquitous web scraper found the wonderful Beebotron site, whose mission is to provide iPlayer-less links to BBC radio streams so you can listen to them with your weapon of choice. I soon found that Radio 6 can be heard at http://bbc.co.uk/radio/listen/live/r6.asx, but pasting this link into Rhythmbox met with silence.
Back to the web trawler, and up popped an article on the Ubuntu Forums website. It seems that the BBC are moving their streams to the proprietary WMA format, which is not supported by a default Ubuntu installation. You need to install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package to get the necessary codecs. (Bizzarely, the package installation link on that page didn't work when I clicked on it in Firefox, so I fired up the Synaptic Package Manager and did it from there instead).
I thought that would be it, but the stream still wouldn't play, so I reverted to the tried-and-trusted "if it don't work, reboot" mentality that's been ingrained by years of exposure to Windoze. Hey Presto! Rhythmbox is now pumping out Radio 6 as I type this post. Job done.
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