Pirate Radio Buster latest?

Support
1

I have just taken back a 2018 Pi Zero W Pirate Radio with additional stereo speaker from daughter, to whom it was a present. It was too difficult for her from the beginning, really. Looking on the forum I see the latest topic about Buster problems was 6 months ago and they appear to have remained unresolved. Had anyone succeeded with a new Buster setup recently, without hours of hacking? Should the Lite image undergo full-updating? I have revised the playlist, so the original and present Jessie or Stretch is working but won’t load URLs for BBC Sounds pages, and the URLs which do work, of the form “http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_radio_fourfm”, keep announcing that they’re on borrowed time and will die in 2023. I thought initially that the problem with “Radio 4 - Listen Live - BBC Sounds” type URLs was a failure to cope with https sites, but WGBH Boston https work OK. Anybody else succeeding with BBC Sounds URLs which, of course, work normally in Chrome on Windows?

2

I can’t comment about BBC Sounds, but you may also want to look at Radio Feeds as an alternative source of radio streams.

Going that way recently solved an issue I was having with Volumio and Absolute Radio, so it might perhaps also work for you with the BBC streams?

They have streams for Radio 4 DAB, LW and Extra (Click here) although not one specifically for FM if you need that rather specifically than DAB.

3

The first url returns a mp3-stream directly, so the player can play it. The second url returns a html-page, with an embedded player, but that is something a webbrowser can deal with but not a program meant to play mp3-streams.

4

Thanks, but I already had Radio Feeds, which links to BBC Sounds format URLs. The advantage of those is that they are a consistent style

5

Thanks- this could well be the explanation of the difficulty with the BBC Sounds format URLs.

6

You can try to install mpg123 on the Pi. Then run “mpg123 url”. This only works for http, not https, but it is a test. As an alternative, use “wget url” (switch to an empty scratch directory for that). If the wget-command does not terminate but just runs, then your url is a stream and not a page.