KRUU-FM Live Stream

Submitted by admin on Wed, 12/20/2006 - 5:27pm.
LISCO = STREAM
KRUU thanks LISCO for donating the live stream bandwidth. If you live in Fairfield, check out their exciting, progressive, new project: FiberToTheHome!
KRUU streams all shows on the internet using MP3 streams. You'll notice on the top left of the page (over there, just below the logo) that there's a link that says "Tune in: High", inside the "On Air" box. If you click on the "High", you'll get a pop-up window that asks you what you want to do with the file - either save to disk or open-with a specific program. In order to play the stream, you need to open the file with an mp3 playlist player. Here's how you get it to work on different systems.
 
If you're on Windows
By default windows will try to open mp3 streams with Windows Media Player. And when you try to open up the PLS file with it, it will fail. There's a cool little utility that you can use which can be found at this link, which will fix that problem. Please let us know what your experience is with it.
We actually recommend WinAmp over Windows Media Player because it plays all kinds of streaming content without problems, has a lot more options, and gives you more flexibility. Another option is iTunes, which many of you might already have installed.
 
If you're on Mac OSX
Probably the easiest way to play the stream is using iTunes. By default when you click on the High link, you'll get a window that says Open-With iTunes (default). Say ok, and you'll be listening through the iTunes interface. The next time you'll be able to just open up KRUU's stream directly in iTunes. We also like VLC a lot, since it's the only player on the Mac that currently supports Ogg Vorbis streaming or playing.
The coolest thing about VLC is that it's the only player that we've worked with that works on all 3 platforms (Windows, Linux, and Mac).
 
If you're on Linux
The player that we use at the station is XMMS. It's stable, and does the job, and is very bare-bones. If you want to run something more full-featured and really cool, here are some options:
Amarok. It's for KDE, but that shouldn't stop you even if you're on Gnome :-) It's been adopted by the VolksWagon (yeah, as in the car) people, and may start showing up in cars. Also, Magnatune.com, one of the music labels we like, is included by default in Amarok.
RhythmBox is Gnome-native. Both Amarok and Rhythmbox have internet radio station management, a-la iTunes
The Banshee project is sort of an iTunes wannabe, built using Mono (which is basically dotNet for Linux). I've been using it for a couple of months and don't mind it at all.
If none of these programs show up in your open-with links, select the "open-with other application ..." option, and you should find them in the /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin folders on your machine.
 
We want to hear about your problems. So please, if you run into difficulty connecting to our stream, or with any part of anything we tell you about, please drop us a note (go to the Contacts link at the top of this page, and go to the GreaseMonkeys link, and fill out the form).
Enjoy

Great tips, for myself, I

Submitted by Jim (not verified) on Sun, 02/10/2008 - 1:00am.

Great tips, for myself, I use streamripper to record kruu-lp 1001.fm streams. For shoutcast style streams it finds the "meta data" or track separation data, and uses that as a marker for where the track should be separated.

Software question

Submitted by Tim (not verified) on Tue, 04/10/2007 - 7:58pm.

Greetings from Florida!

I've been giving some thought to both Creative Commons-based radio and to a co-op streaming idea (to offset Copyight Royalty Board increases). I'm a mainframe programmer by trade, but I'm still thinking about this.

Anyway, that's a roundabout way of explaining how I came to your site from Creative Commons; but I don't quite understand something yet: is XMMS what you use for _streaming_ your shows? You described it as a player so I think I'm a little confused. I've read of Amarok as a player, so I describing it in the same paragraph as XMMS makes me thing that XMMS is a player as well?

Thanks
Tim

XMMS

Submitted by Anish Nambiar (not verified) on Mon, 11/12/2007 - 3:02am.

XMMS is a media player for linux. Amarok is also a media player. I am not sure what the query is but yes...the kruufm media server is linux based (ubuntu)and is a case study on their site. The KRUUFM team is a non profit radio station.

great to hear you!

Submitted by Dori (not verified) on Thu, 02/15/2007 - 2:36pm.

I have just returned to Fairfield after 10 years. I have been very active with our listener supported radio station in Bridgeport CT, WPKN 89.5 fm, and WPKM 88.7 in Montauk Long Island. I thought we were one of the few independent radio stations left in the country. Its very exciting that now Fairfield has its own downhome REAL live radio. Its wonderful to hear you!