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Good radio stations can be hard to come by. My personal preference is for a mix of older and contemporary tracks, with a healthy dose of variety but nothing too far outside mainstream. One such radio station is Wellington's More FM, to which you can listen live using your web browser. I'm not keen on Internet radio delivered via a browser window because I usually end up closing the tab/ window by mistake! This Saturday morning project produced an OS X app to keep in the Dock for when the urge to listen to More FM strikes; it opens a network stream and commences automatic playback, using either of the VLC or QuickTime players.

Tested under Mac OS X 10.5.6 using VLC 0.9.9 (Intel) and QT 7.6.

A browser-based player

Windows Media Player 10 content as streamed by More FM won't playback via your Mac within Safari unless you have downloaded and installed both Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OS X and Windows Media® Components for QuickTime from Microsoft:

A VLC-based player

This Automator application for OS X uses the Play Movie from URL automator action by Jason Prell, available from Apple here. You'll need to have installed this action and of course the veritable VLC to use it:

If Play Movie from URL is not pre-installed you'll see an error:

A QuickTime-based player

QuickTime is installed with Mac OS X by default. This app uses the default Run AppleScript action included with Automator, but QuickTime needs the help of Flip4Mac WMV to handle the WMA2 audio codec (VLC has built-in support). It won't work if Flip4Mac WMV is not pre-installed:

If nothing happens with either the QT or VLC app despite appropriate pre-installations, have patience or try again later. Sometimes the connection is refused by the streaming server if it is too busy.

Download

You can find the apps on the bioneural.net Extra page, or download via this page.

Download Dockupier apps for QuickTime and VLC here (1.2MB .zip).

The app icon

Apple's Icon Composer, one of the Xcode developer tools, was used to make the icon with the help of this tutorial. The app icon merges the Beehive by Cian Walsh of Afterglow (see his excellent NZ icon set) with the generic Apple tunes icon.

Update 05.04.09: Dockupier apps also made for Capital FM (London), which don't require pre-installation of Microsoft Silverlight, and Peak FM (Chesterfield), which doesn't require pre-installation of Real Player. See Extra.

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