Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Online Radio Help

I have written this as a help to the problems that can come while playing online radio, hope this helps!
  1. Radio is not working :
  2. Song is playing with gaps of a few second!
  3. Which all stations can I listen to?
  4. Why don't I get full speed as told by the ISP??

1 - Internet Explorer Users:
Internet Explorer 7 or 8 is so great, that it does not even trust 'Windows Media Player' built by same company to display in the inbuilt browser. It gives a small cute bar (LOL) at the top that "The webpage wants to use 'Windows Media Player' built by 'Microsoft Corporation' to display all its content, allow it or block it". Great, joke of the day:). Click that bar and choose 'Allow blocked content.' and it's done. And luckily from the next time you probably wouldn't need to do that. And Enjoy!

2 - Firefox or Opera Fanboys :
Firefox lovers you may need to do a litle bit of work just one time, it's just because Firefox is created by Mozilla and not Microsoft, the 'Windows Media Player' which is used in playing this radio is not properly connected to Firefox. But Hey, Firefox is one of the best browsers, and there should be a way out of that, and guess what - there is:

How to make the radio work (geeks could skip a few lines :p)
  1. Just download this small plug-in (0.3 MB). (read more at official site)
  2. Close firefox.
  3. Click "wmpfirefoxplugin" (the file you downloaded).
  4. Click 'Next' button.
  5. Another window will open click on 'I accept the terms in the Licence Agreement' in the left bottom and then click 'Next'.
  6. Then click 'Install' in the new window. Wait few seconds and click 'Finish'.
Seems like you learned the basics of installation. Cheers;) Open firefox, and yeah come on open our blog "www.hindisongss.blogspot.com". Click 'Online Radio' in the top and choose a radio station. And enjoy!
  1. Note: From the next time you just need to open our blog to treat yourself with some real cool music. Cheers!
  2. Opera Fanboys can use almost use this same method, the same plug-in works in Opera also:)
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3 - Which all station can I listen to??

Based on you net speed you can find the stations that you can listen to. Here are some type of Internet connections that users generally have :-
  • Dial Up - 56 kbps max (actaully 7 KBps max:) - you can listen to stations in the dial up section at the top, while you may give 64 kbps stations a try. I hope that they stream fine (don't stop after each second).
  • CDMA - 150 kbps max (actually 18 KBps max :) - you can try all the stations, but if you have problems in 128 kbps stations, enjoy the 64 kbps streams. They are also good.
  • Boradband - (256 kpbs - 100 mbps) - well the world is yours:)
Note : If you lie in between somewhere or don't know which type of connection you have. You should start with a 128 kbps station a try and if they play continuously Jackpot!, but if you hear broken songs, it's time to try 64 kbps station and if still not getting continuous play, then dial-up section is for you buddy.
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4 - My Connection is of 2 mbps and I dont even reach 0.3 MBps. Why??
Well this might be unrelated to radio, but quite alot of my freinds have asked this, so this is for them. When I was a small kid, I called my ISP (BSNL, Airtel or Tata Indicom for peolple of India), that sir you tell 256 kbps and I never get above 30 KBps, why you don't give what is promised? The gentleman replied the sentence that was printed on the manual of my net connection, 'The average speed varies between 100 kbps to 180 kbps according to the time.", "Thank you for you great answer", I dropped the line!!

The confusion prevailed and was finally wiped out when I first encountered online radio. Here is the golden answer "1 Byte is equal to 8 bits." . You might have noted that I have used small caps 'mb' and large caps 'MB' in the heading. And all that we see is in Bytes or KiloBytes (KB) or Megabytes (MB). But intelligent ISPs (Internet Service ProviderS) use for their advertising purposes bits, kilobits (kb) or megabits (mb). Hope it becomes clear with the following :-

KiloBytes per second - KBps (what we see)
kilobits per second - (what ISP's actually boast, 8 times less than a KBps, fools the customers)
MegaBytes per second - MBps
megabits per second - mbps (8 times less than a MBps, 1 mbps is equivalent to 128 KBps).

Now songs what my blog's all about, you see 128 kbps, you might now already know at which speed it is actually transferred 16 KBps (128/8 = 16, thank God! I studied Mathematics:)

Geeks : I know you are gonna kill me if I tell one more word! apologies for being so pedantic :)

This was all that I could think may possibly pose a problem, but hey you can definitely ask anything though the comments below and I will try my best to help you out.
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Music Freak!
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