I find my UMPC particularly useful for consuming audio media. Others have written about using the UMPC as a music or podcast player. I want to share what I've learned using the UMPC as an “internet radio” for listening to on-line radio stations.

What is Internet Radio?

Podcasts are a popular format for internet content, usually delivering discrete “chunks” of audio content on demand. Whether you find podcasts by browsing your favorites, subscribing to them in RSS feeds, or using stand-alone software such as iTunes, when you listen to a podcast you generate a request for the audio file and a server responds by sending it to you. In this post, I use internet radio to refer to a different mode of content delivery.

Internet radio follows a more traditional broadcast radio model. Programming comes from a single continuous (or scheduled) source, which is delivered in the form of a stream. When you “tune in” to the stream, you hear what is being sent at that given time. This is useful both for covering near-real-time (a ten second lag or so is typical) events and for providing a “point-and-click” form of programming that you can enjoy any time without worrying about when new segments become available and keeping track of which ones you've already listened to.

Many existing broadcast stations (with real transmitters on the ground or on a satellite transponder) also broadcast on the internet. This includes many metropolitan AM/FM stations, which might be a good way to keep on “ear” on your favorite remote city. It also includes many stations that transmit in the shortwave spectrum, the “old school” way of getting a signal over the horizon. Shortwave broadcasters sometimes struggle to stay on the air through shifting technological and political trends, but many have invested in the internet as an outlet for their often high-quality programming teams. Here you can find overseas news, news from a different perspective, high-quality special-interest programming, practice with foreign languages, as well as a few remaining propaganda machines!

How is Internet Radio Received?

Internet radio broadcasters use a wide variety of streaming formats. Many can be received with a “stock” Windows PC (including your UMPC). Some require special codecs to be installed. I will only cover a couple of formats that I have personally set up.

The UMPC makes an ideal “radio” that, as long as you have a WiFi connection, you can move from room to room. If you have a nicer built-in speaker, the free-standing audio quality is comparable to transistor radio. You can also plug the UMPC into a good stereo system, a set of powered speakers, or a set of Bluetooth headphones. Some lower stream bitrates can even be delivered over a wireless wide-area network (WWAN), if you have such a data connection.

Finding Internet Radio Stations

You can usually find a stream for a known terrestrial radio station by going to their website. For instance, here in Seattle you can go to http://www.kmtt.com for 103.7 “The Mountain”. Like many broadcast stations, you'll find a “Listen Now” button somewhere on the page. In the case of KMTT, you are prompted with a request to register with the station. I have nothing against this. Providing a stream costs the provider in terms of infrastructure and bandwidth, and here they probably want to get some marketing data in exchange. Whether and how you register is up to you, but this step could present a problem when you are using a keyboard-less UMPC on the go (it also presents a problem to more limited devices like dedicated WiFi radios). To help with this, http://www.reciva.com is a comprehensive internet stream catalog. It can help you find streams as well as store your own favorite stream list online.

So, go to http://www.reciva.com and in the search box, type “KMTT”. You will find a listing for 103.7, including its genre and other information. If you click on the descriptive link, you will be taken to a page that shows additional information, including the results of collaborative filtering that show you what stations others are listening to (who also listen to the station you chose). You can find streams without registering with Reciva, but if you register you can keep your list of favorites there along with notes, and you can optionally log all station usage. With Reciva you can also browse stations by genre or location.

If you can't find the stream of the station you are looking for, there are ways to dig in and find streams, including using a WinPCap-based socket sniffer to find out what streams are accessed while you interact with a web site, use an Adobe Flash application, etc. I won't go into those details here, but you can read the help page on Reciva.

Playlists and Codecs

As I mentioned before, not all streams will play in Windows Media Player (or your other favorite player) unaided. There are many stream formats and other quirks of streaming systems. I can't possibly address them all in a blog entry, so I will mention two that I have personally tackled.

If you are a geek in western Washington, there is a pretty decent chance that you will at least have heard of Bellingham's American Museum of Radio and Electricity. AMRE operates a low-power FM (LPFM) radio station in Bellingham that mimics the programming of radio's “Golden Age.” If you need to set the mood, you'll be glad to know that KMRE-LP simulcasts on the internet. KMRE-LP uses the Shoutcast streaming system. The underlying format of this stream is MP3 (which WMP can play), but the launch point of the stream is wrapped in a playlist file in the PLS format, which WMP does not support natively.

Fortunately, there is a freely available utility, OpenPLSinWMP, which you can download from http://tools.veloc-it.com/. Once you have run the installer, a small console app will run when you allow the browser to open a .PLS file. This app will parse the XML and launch WMP on the contained stream.

If you wander through enough media sources on the internet, you will certainly encounter the AAC format. AAC is a standard that improves on MP3 in several ways, including better sound quality at lower bitrates. Its popularity has increased by its role as the audio layer of MPEG-4 and default audio format of the iPod and iTunes.

There are codecs that allow you to play various flavors of AAC in WMP. You can find them individually, but I installed the Windows Essentials Media Codec Pack, which provides an installer and a set of tested codecs that cover most common formats. With the codec pack installed, I was able to play more streams.

Of course, you could also just use another player client (like WinAMP or Quicktime), but I try to keep my installation simple and I am on the lookout for a user interface that is most usable on the UMPC form factor. Many streaming scenarios are not currently supported directly in the Origami Experience.

Optimizing UMPC Usability

With our newfound streams, now the issue is trying to conveniently select and control radio playback on the UMPC form factor. I often listen to internet radio in the kitchen, and like many UMPC scenarios I have limited attention and only a finger to keep my UMPC humming while doing dishes or whatever.

Creating a profile and adding a set of favorite stations in Reciva is a good start. If a stream moves, it is likely that the community of Reciva users will find it and update it. If you tire of your current selection, it is easy to find another station based on genre, location, etc. The downside is that you must log in and the web interface isn't exactly optimized for touch. One suggestion I have is to add www.reciva.com to your set of trusted sites to prevent additional prompts, especially when clicking on a link opens playlist files that must be trusted. Do this at your own risk, of course.

Setting favorite links in your browser is also a good way to keep track of stations.

One idea I tried with Origami Experience is creating URL shortcuts and adding them to the Programs center. Just to throw out another hopelessly geeky content source, I created a shortcut to the W0KIE satellite network, which carries mostly amateur-produced material around radio, electronics, and satellite TV. I created a direct link to their internet broadcast, and then dragged this shortcut from Internet Explorer to a known file location. This creates a file a .URL extension. I can then go into Origami Experience and add an item, browsing to this URL file. I chose to add it to the Entertainment group.

Really, I hope that some burgeoning software developer creates a great UMPC radio application, something that does what some of the stand-alone WiFi radios do and more.

As an aside, another fast-growing area of internet radio creates a personalized stream for you based on your likes and dislikes. Pandora is the canonical example. By making the content not completely “by demand,” but driven by preference, you can hear your favorite songs while the operator holds contents rights similar to a broadcast station.

In order to pull this off, Pandora uses a Flash-based client control that lives in the browser. Unfortunately, that Flash app is extremely UMPC-unfriendly. It depends on hover, has controls that are difficult to target, and for some reason its text input controls (i.e. for username and password input) don't work well with the TIP (the Tablet PC Input Panel or soft keyboard). We will have to see UMPCs and other mobile devices take increasing share of clients before most apps are very UMPC-friendly. If you use Pandora, let them know you want an accessible user interface!

I hope you find some of the ideas and tips in this post useful. If you discover great ideas for using UMPCs for internet radio, please share them with the community!