DI.FM/SKY.FM Aliases/quick launch via FARR

[Kamel]

I am a huge fan of di.fm and sky.fm (basically the same place). I love the music, but I scan through their stations a lot. I noticed, it is annoying that every time I play a different radio station I have to reopen their service etc. What I'd like to do is learn how to make my own aliases so that I can use find and run robot to launch winamp with the corresponding radio station. For instance:

di.fm eurodance aac

Should open di.fm's eurodance station the aac version.

di.fm vocal trance mp3

Should open the vocal trance station, the mp3 stream.

Is there an easy way to do this? I have thought about manually editing the playlist to add all of the stations I want, but then again I listen to some pretty crazy ones when I'm in those weird moods (such as salsa) that I truly would only want when I specifically request it, rather than having it on a playlist that it may auto jump to if the buffer runs out.

Would this be fairly easy to do? I am thinking it is, but perhaps I'm very wrong.

[mouser]

seems fairly easy to do but im not sure it would depend on winamp i guess.

let me ask you this.. is there a commandline you could invoke that would open winamp and tell it to go to those stations you mention?
or, is there some windows messages you can send to winamp to cause it to do that?
or maybe there is simply a url that when opened in web browser (or winamp) causes winamp to open to that?

in other words, your first step has to be to figure out how to call winamp and have it open those streams, leaving aside any issue of interfacing with farr.  once you figure out how to do that non-interactively, then ask again how to add such triggers to farr.

[tranglos]

What I did was create bookmarks (in both Winamp and AIMP) for all the stations listed at http://www.sky.fm. It takes a couple of clicks to get to a bookmark, but it's still pretty quick.

An easy solution using FARR would be to right-click and save-as all the links to the stations listed on that SkyFM page, each with a unique name, e.g. "salsa.pls", and put those files where FARR can find them. FARR would then launch whatever player is registered for handling pls playlist fles.

(I love Sky.FM!)

[mouser]

if tranglos solution works you could even create a special farr alias that knows where the pls files are and restricted a search to them, so you could type:

difm blah

and it would show all .pls files in a certain directory that match the term "blah"

using pls files would also probably have the advantage that:
it would launch winamp if not running, or leave winamp running and just open stream if it was already running (like a browser).

[Kamel]

Thanks guys, gives me some 'food for thought'. I need to clear some other things from my plate before beginning this, but I'd really like to do this. I'll definitely share my work if I am able to get this, glad to see I'm not the only di/sky user here tranglos

[Kamel]

let me ask you this.. is there a commandline you could invoke that would open winamp and tell it to go to those stations you mention?
or, is there some windows messages you can send to winamp to cause it to do that?

-mouser (November 20, 2008, 11:28 AM)

Simply doing for instance, winamp.exe "http://www.di.fm/aacplus/eurodance.pls" will open the appropriate file. There is not really a good reason to store the playlist files locally since if the playlist files aren't available at the specified location, the radio itself wont be available either.

Is it easy to make FARR aliases to do things as this? Could I make it automatic, or would I have to include an alias for handling each and every radio station on sky/di?

[Kamel]

What I did was create bookmarks (in both Winamp and AIMP) for all the stations listed at http://www.sky.fm. It takes a couple of clicks to get to a bookmark, but it's still pretty quick.

An easy solution using FARR would be to right-click and save-as all the links to the stations listed on that SkyFM page, each with a unique name, e.g. "salsa.pls", and put those files where FARR can find them. FARR would then launch whatever player is registered for handling pls playlist fles.

(I love Sky.FM!)

-tranglos (November 20, 2008, 01:22 PM)

Unfortunately, I don't believe the version of winamp I use supports bookmarks. I hate winamp pro. As a matter of fact, I've yet to find a media player for windows that is satisfactory (however, I love the linux xmms player).

[Kamel]

using pls files would also probably have the advantage that:
it would launch winamp if not running, or leave winamp running and just open stream if it was already running (like a browser).

-mouser (November 20, 2008, 01:37 PM)

Sorry for posting so many times in a row! This is exactly the manner in which winamp works when invoking from the command line in the way I mentioned earlier. Sending messages to winamp is actually quite trivial, they have made it very easy for external programs etc to control and use winamp from my understanding.