Streaming wheaty audio success!
Media
The gorgeous herrie audio player with Whole Wheaty goodness
If you had read my previous post on internet streaming (Even more woes with streaming internet audio) you would know that I've been having difficulties listening to streaming internet audio. You could even say I've been having woes with it.
Here's the scenario: I could not listen to the Whole Wheat Radio audio streams at home on my MacBook Pro, however if I took said computer to any of the net cafes in the city, I could. As I surmised in the aforementioned post, I figured it must have therefore been an issue with either our router or our ISP.
It turns out that in fact I am capable of listening to Whole Wheat Radio at home by using their high quality audio feed. I had always stuck to the low and medium fidelity feeds in the past because ISPs in Australia have download caps (yuk!), and a 20GiB monthly allowance disappears faster than you can say "Oh Wow, Obama Is President!" I assume this is because of the different software in play (ha!) on this stream compared to the others.
All I had to do was disconnect our router and plug our ADSL modem directly into our cute little ethernet switch, then manually assign IP addresses and DNS servers to our laptops. I assume then that this must have been an issue with this router.
So as you can see in the screenshot above, I can now play Whole Wheat Radio at home again! The software pictured is herrie, a very lightweight and easy to use terminal based audio player that uses a fraction of the system resources of QuickTime or iTunes on Mac; and Exaile or Amarok on Unix-like systems… perfect for tuning into an audio feed. I hope to do a review of it alongside the player it replaced called MOC which replaced Cmus. I'm passionate about finding the right software for the right job, and I'm not a believer in sacrificing a user experience just so you can use two features of one application instead of using two applications.
Look out Jim, another random media player listening to your media again and confusing the What's Playing page… he doesn't look too impressed.
