Listen to a shoutcast with Android

Question

Hey, since quite some time I'm trying to listen to .pls files (shoutcasts). I have to say that I failed horrible. Since StreamFurious can do it it must be possible. First I tried to connect to the shoutcast via sockets (TCP and UDP) --> failed. I couldn't even receive one byte from the server.

I'm at the verge of tears. I don't even have a clue what's the best way to establish a connection and afterwards continually download/receive the data stream.

I really hope someone can point me to the right direction and give me a short code snippet if available.

Rgds Layne

Answer 1

You can try these resources:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1932620/shoutcast-streaming

http://ostermiller.org/shoutgrab/

http://code.google.com/p/streamscraper/

http://code.google.com/p/castor-streamer/

http://mp3imagetagextr.sourceforge.net/ShoutcastPlsDownloader/index.html

From what I can tell, you may need to handle the PLS download (via HTTP if I understand correctly) and parsing yourself, but you can then hand the actual audio stream URLs to MediaPlayer for playback. Assuming those streams are within specifications (and not all are), Android should be able to play them back. But I am not a Shoutcast expert by any means.

Answer 2

Android 2.2 (FroYo) now natively streams Shoutcast streams.

For older devices, in addition to the above links see http://code.google.com/p/npr-android-app/ which includes a proxy for buffering shoutcast streams.

Answer 3

TuneWiki! Great music player, and excellent Internet radio streamer.