AutoHotkey Community

Aaron's Christian Radio Central v1.00

This is something I'm working on... a central location for
a variety of online streaming Christian radio stations:
(currently 17 stations available and working)


It is very easy to use... select a station and listen!

System Requirements:
- tested on Windows 7 32-bit
- Internet access (a fast internet connection works best)
- Adobe Flash Player
- AHK_L (for non-EXE use)

Download:
Aaron's Christian Radio Central.exe (recommended, works for everyone)
Aaron's Christian Radio Central.ahk (for AutoHotkey users only)

Instructions:
- Open the program and select a station from the dropdown menu
- Wait for Station to load
- Description text (to the right of the menu) becomes link to chosen station's website

Questions, comments and insults are all welcome!
Please report any issues here
I hope you enjoy the radio.

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Some of my scripts .

Updated to v1.00

- cleaned up code somewhat
- increased station selection... 17 stations now available

I'm on the hunt for WAY more online Christian radio stations... if anyone wants to contribute, please consider the following guidelines:

- the station's player should start automatically on its parent page or from its own link (script opens link in hidden ActiveX control on GUI)
- stations should be kept to flash players (not everyone has WMP or WinAMP to open .ASX or .PLS streams)

Flash players will open up inside the hidden ActiveX control and stay hidden,
WMP etc will open on their own, and this takes away from the "clean" interface in my opinion.

Please feel free to drop links to stations here ...the more, the merrier. I know not all of you agree with the idea of God
but the more I hear and see what is on regular mainstream radio and TV,
the more I want to try and make a dent with positive stuff like this.

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Some of my scripts .

Sorry for this necro reply. I just found this.

This script is a pretty good example of how to use the new ActiveX object to play Flash radio stations. It seems to work. At first I thought it wasn't working on some stations but I finally figured out that sometimes it takes a while for the station to connect, buffer, and then play.

Although Christian music is not my thing, I do like internet radio and collecting a list of good genre-specific stations is not a bad idea. If you are truly interested in gaining access to large number of Christian radio stations, you may have to give up your Flash requirement. Yes, there are stations that support Flash but there are many (many) more that don't. The Shoutcast directory has more "Christian" stations than I could count. My guess: 1,200+. A recent version of the RadioSure app listed 1,091 "Christian" radio stations. The Icecast directory has 110+ "Christian" stations listed. If you wanted to extend the "Christian" genre to other religions and other non-specific religious categories, you probably could pick up a few hundred more stations.

How many of these stations are any good or fit the criteria for the type of Christian radio stations you are looking for? I would venture to guess that most are bad or don't fit your criteria but even if just 10 or 15 percent of the stations are excellent, you would still have a massive number of stations to choose from.

Them be might thoughts. Thanks for sharing your script.

Thanks for your observations, jballi... yes of course this script could be applied to all other styles and genres of music. I suppose with a big GUI and a number of listboxes or dropdown menus could cover a very large range of stations. I'm totally going to check out the information you've left here, thank you very much

The problem I gave up trying to solve is the .ASX or .PLS (i think) playlist file extensions... these open up inside the User's local media player, but only if that particular player is installed. Also, if the player is opened up "hidden" this is ok... but if the media player is already open, it gets jacked and does not hide.
Also... some streams are RealPlayer, some are QuickTime, and some are Windows Media Player. Not everyone has all the players, and I'm totally stumped at how to make that work ???? lol

So the easiest way is to add the ones with Flash web players and that only requires the User to have one Adobe Flash Player installed.

...I'm not trying to exclude other kinds of music, but for this particular project I'll keep it to the Christian stuff as that is what my wife has requested.
I'm already at work on a "general" one with multiple dropdown selection menus based on Genre.

Thanks for sharing Aaron. Nice job.

Please consider using an INI or XML file for storing the stations. This will make it easier to add new stations as they are discovered and allow your users to edit the station list as they see fit, especially useful for people that have local stations that everyone else might not be interested in or those who don't listen to English language stations.

I just wanted to comment/clarify/expand on a few items.



.PLS, .M3U, .ASX, etc. are just file extensions to playlist files. For internet radio stations, these playlist files contain one or more URLs to an internet ration station server.

Just like any other file extensions, the .PLS, .M3U, .ASX, etc. file extensions may or may not be registered to a program. On my computer, Winamp is the registered program for these files. When I double click on one of these files or when I click on an internet link that downloads one of these files, Winamp is used to play the URLs in the playlist.

Is Winamp required? Of course not. Most programs that can play internet radio stations can be used to play these playlists. The problem is that when you install a new or updated version of a media player and you use the default settings, the program will try to become the registered program for the file extensions it cares about. Windows Media Player will grab the .ASX extension, iTunes and QuickTime will grab the .QTL extension. RealPlayer will... Oh come on! Who uses RealPlayer any more?

The problem I think you're having is that these file extensions are registered to more than one program AND one or more of these file extensions are not registered to any program. So... when you try to play these various playlists, more than one programs runs and sometimes the request fails because the the file extension is not registered.

Do you need more than one program to play a variety of internet radio stations? Answer: Definitely not. You just need a program that will play all (or most) types of radio stations and the program must be registered to play the playlists that internet radio stations use. The following is a list of programs that will play most of the internet radio stations out there. It's not an exhaustive list but it will give you an idea.

AIMP3
Foobar2000
jetAudio
KMPlayer
VLC
Winamp
XMPlay

I'm not trying to discourage you from using Flash. If it works for you and you're happy with it, you should use. All I was saying is that most Christian radio stations out there do not use Flash so it is definitely a limiting factor.


An external XML or flat file (tab delimited should work great) is definitely the way to go.


Thank for letting me ramble and good luck.

just a thought, can't you parse those playlist files yourself in ahk and play the acquired urls directly? if they are really just a list of urls seems easy enough (maybe not as easy if they are binary files storing those urls)

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Notify() | Compile() | Instance() | LV_Group()
EitherMouse
Recommended: AHK_L (don't forget its a superset of _Basic)

I will definitely look into everything that has been mentioned here thank you all very much for the valuable info!
jballi: I totally see what you are saying... there are ways to use only one player with all those playlist extension names. I still see a big problem with people who do not have a clue about how one media player can play something but the next media cannot play the same file... Most PC people who are not heavily into computers will only have the Windows Media player on their system... and this means as soon as a .PLS stream is opened, the dreaded "cannot play this file" message is shown. At that moment (in their minds) it is the script that is broken.
I'll look more into this, and I'll add the channels to an INI and I'll also make a GUI that lets people add stations of their own.

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Some of my scripts .