Streamtuner and Shoutcast

The other day I fired up Streamtuner to listen so some Christmas tunes on Shoutcast. Imagine my surprise when Streamtuner wouldn’t bring up any channels. What a disappointment. A quick check of the Streamtuner site indicated the application is no longer maintained. Bummer.

Not willing to give up I made some checks around the internet and found that the Shoutcast site was alive and well. Apparently they have brought up a new site with a different connection api and Streamtuner won’t connect to it.

I checked some more and found what sounded like some not so good fixes. The one that I did find though was quite simple. The folks at Shoutcast are nice enough to keep the old site up and running so all you need is the ip address to the archive site.

To make a long story short make the following entry into the /etc/hosts file:

205.188.234.120 www.shoutcast.com


Now pull up Streamtuner. Unfortunately all you will get are the top streams which is probably ok for most purposes.

An alternative to this is to use Songbird. Songbird promises to “help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music”. Since they rely on having a 3rd party music player they have a long ways to go but they do handle Shoutcast streams quite well.

-j