It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything in the blog… Sorry for that… very busy times. I had a lot of ideas of what my “comeback post” should be about, but I knew I had to share one of my relatively recent discoveries that made my smartphone online-radio listening experience a whole lot better

If you don’t know yourmuze.fm, this might be the time to get to know it. It’s a free service that has a LOT of worldwide radio stations available as an online stream for usage with most of the smartphones.

In order to start using it you need to register for free via your desktop computer, and add the stations you like. Later on, you can surf to the mobile version of the service by mobile web and listen to the stations you selected.

So far so good… I like it. But how about multitasking?

The thing is, if you are an average Android user, and try to use the service, then when you will try to hear the station, it will use the stock movie player and will not let you to do anything on your phone while listening to the music.

If you answer a call, or even go to the home screen – Your playback will be stopped, since it must run in the foreground

I have done a small research and discovered a very nice way to make yourmuze run in the background and let you do whatever you like while listening to music.

I use it with my GPS app, listening to online music while navigating.

This is relatively simple.

1. Download Dolphin Browser HD and XiiaLive Lite from the market (feel free to buy XiiaLive full if you like it)
   
2. Open up Dolphin Browser, and hit your phone’s Menu button, then select More and then Settings
   
3. Scroll down to User Agent, and select iPhone
   

That’s it!

Go back to the browser, and surf to m.yourmuze.fm and login with your credentials. When you will try to listen to your station you will be able to choose if you want to listen with XiiaLive. I chose it to be default.

There you go. One the station is played you can navigate away from the app and do your multitasking

Hope you will find this post is helpful

Arnon

It can also work for you, in case your IT does not block by protocol, only by address.

So here’s how to do it:

STEP 1 – Retrieve the actual link for your radio station

Go to the station’s website and try to get a link that you can play in Windows Media Center.
Some stations will let you find it, others won’t.
If this is the case, here’s what you need to do (At home!)

1. Download wireshark and install it
2. Start capturing using this filter: rtsp.request
3. Try to listen to the station
4. You should see such an output in wireshark:

   

   As you can see, there is a url here that looks like this:
   rtsp://someurl/somefile RTSP/1.0

5. Take this URL, and replace RTSP with MMS and omit the RTSP/1.0 ending.
   Your URL should look like this: mms://someurl.somefile
6. Try to play this URK in windows media player. If it works – you’re half way through

If you can get the link in any other way, it’s fine… This is only a suggestion

STEP 2 – Set up VLC as a stream server at your home

I will start with an apology. I didn’t find a proper way to do it with the GUI of version 1.0+.
On the past versions it was relatively clear, so that’s where I managed to find the command line you need to run in order for it to work
So, at this point, you need to run VLC on your PC with these parameters:

vlc mms://yourserver/yourlink :sout=#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=64,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=mmsh,mux=asfh,dst=:8080}}

This will stream the web-radio station to port 8080.
You can test this using Windows Media Player, just open it up, and open the url mms://localhost:8080

Another thing you need to keep in mind, is that you should establish port forwarding if you are behind NAT.

 That’s the whole deal… Of course you can improve it by creating a script that will run it, or add the http interface of VLC to remote control it on another port, but I don’t want to overload this guide…

keep it simple!