Rubenerd

It's become a little tradition of mine to break in new operating system installs by tuning into Whole Wheat Radio before I do anything else (Low-Fi, Med-Fi, Hi-Fi). It's useful because it tests both the sound card and more importantly the network.

Audion is a [relative] dead end

When I installed the newly released Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro and got ready to install Audion to tune into the MP3Pro stream, it occurred to me that Audion is a PowerPC application. Snow Leopard is now an Intel only system, and while you can install Rosetta as an optional extra, the rabid system perfectionist inside of me cringes at the idea of installing an entire extra subsystem for only one application.

I've switched to QuickTime for now to play Whole Wheat on my Mac but because it doesn't have the MP3Pro decoder the quality suffers. Unfortunately, I cannot find anyone still supporting MP3Pro on the Mac.

QuickTime 10

While the quality might not be as good as MP3Pro for the same stream size, at my house here in Adelaide where we have a strict download quota I generally only listen to the Med-Fi stream anyway so quality is less of a concern.

With this in mind, QuickTime 10 that came with Snow Leopard is fantastic, its brand new minimalistic UI is very unobtrusive and fast, and part of me really gets a kick out of being told I'm listening to a Live Broadcast :)

User agent string

One of the great things about Whole Wheat Radio is you can also view who's listening and where at the same time you are, along with what software they're using to tune in with.

Because QuickTime is now an important architectural sublayer of Snow Leopard (a dedicated Mac developer may want to correct me on that) the user agent string for QuickTime and other software that utilises it's resources (such as iTunes) is now a cryptic reference to the OS rather than to QuickTime.

I added information on this along with a screenshot to the Whole Wheat Radio wiki, Jim Kloss might want to just create a redirect instead to QuickTime or to the Mac pages but I figured it was worth explaining so at least there aren't any red links on the who's listening page.

Grilled cheese sandwiches

It had to be said :).