As you may know, I love making little internet radios from Raspberry Pi computers – mostly so I can listen to the wonderful French radio station Fip. Fip plays a mixture of jazz, left-field rock and pop, classical music – it’s hard to describe, but it is my favourite radio station in the world.
My little internet radio in the kitchen stopped working, and it turns out Fip’s streaming URL has changed – you can now find it at http://audio.scdn.arkena.com/11016/fip-midfi128.mp3
When BBC radio changed its streaming methods recently, it took a huge amount of detective work for me to find out how to play BBC radio – which I’ve paid for as part of the licence fee – on my internet radios. More recently, Apple launched its own radio services, and I found it was impossible to listen to its Beats1 station at launch on a brand new MacBook. Even last night, I updated iTunes to the latest version and found that while I could get Beats1 to play, none of the links to genre-specific ‘featured stations’ did anything at all. Not one. Were they ALL off air at 10pm UK time?
Fip, on the other hand, actually want you to listen. They have this lovely page outlining a myriad of listening options: on FM in different French cities, on their web site, via Android and iOS apps, via satellite and finally, via a direct streaming URL. That’s the way to do it.