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Internet Radio!

nathall

nathall

6502
This thread could really go several places, but...

Recently reminiscing of using my IIsi connected to some decent speakers to play AIFFs in my home office, as well as iTunes under 10.2.8 to stream music via “Internet radio” many years ago, I looked into things to see if there was still a viable solution for streaming music on classic Macs. The version of iTunes that runs under 10.2.8 no longer connects to any online streams.

There is!

Classic applications AMP Radio and various versions of MacAMP have Shoutcast/Icecast support. There’s a searchable database of active streams at https://dir.xiph.org/

So far, I’ve been able to get this running on the following:

“Power Mac C600”* (under 8.1)
Power Mac 6300/120 (under 9.1)
Power Mac 8500/G3 (under 10.2.8)

A PPC processor seems to be the base requirement, but I was a bit surprised to find the “C600” which isn’t even a native PPC machine is able to stream this music perfectly with no drops, even while a screen saver is running (though the saver runs slowly, it seems the streaming playback takes CPU priority).

It seems that so far at least, this corner of the Internet hasn’t been subjected to superfluous and unnecessary encryption, just for encryption’s sake.

I’ll be utilizing this quite a bit now I know it’s still available... Anyone else explored this?


* (A IIvx/600 class machine with a 601/100Mhz PPC card.)
 
I can't quite look it up now re making breakfast very shortly then heading out for a few hours..but I know that for a while there was a particular system7today topic (which kept showing up in the 'latests post' rank which is how I noticed it for awhile) about finding existing internet radio sources that still functioned in vintage desktop softwares

maybe you should see if you can find that one to get started some more with? ;-)
 
Don't forget about the nubango iTunes patches! I found some pretty kick-ass stations in Classic using iTunes 2.0.4. Also check out moonmission.jp and plaza.one if you like weird music like me
 
@nathall So this can work! I always kind of figured as much, but never bothered to try.

I have a stream you can check out if you like old music (I play all sorts of stuff, from 80s classic hits to classical). PM me for a link if interested; I can't post it publicly because I don't have a license for that yet (I found a sort of "grey area" is to share it discretely with a couple people here and there to keep it private). I want to get a license eventually, but it's expensive.

c
 
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During #Marcintosh 2025, I was live broadcasting a RealAudio server with on-demand content, plus live streams of 3 separate sources: two vintage iPods, and one iPhone SE 2015 playing internet radio. Each source was encoded in 3 different bitrates: 14.4kbps Mono, 28.8kbps Mono, and 80kbps Stereo.

The lowest bitrate (14.4) was the original RealAudio 2.0 codec released in 1995. Though it sounded poor, it did technically run on a 68030 (tested on an LC III).

The middle bitrate (28.8) brought a 68040 to its knees.

The highest bitrate (80) required a PowerPC. It taxed a 66MHz PPC 601 (Power Mac 6100), but anything faster was fine.

For "modern" Macs (OS 9+), I also had a fourth stream of RealVideo 8 at SureStream from 28.8kbps to 384kbps, which played a random assortment of videos on loop. The source was a laptop, acquired by HDMI to USB.

Oh, and did I mention that all of this was running on an Intel Mac Pro 2013, hosting four Windows VMs running concurrently? All of the capture hardware was virtualized into the VMs.

Thanks to the Internet Archive and some sleuthing, I found a version of the RealServer and a key generator that gave me as many clients as I cared to provision. 100 seemed prudent; however, I never received more than 10 simultaneous listeners.

There were some odd technical hurdles to overcome with the RealPlayer installer. One was particularly stupid: the installer for one specific version had a built in expiration date of February 2002 or 2003. If you set your vintage Mac's calendar to 1997 (for 2025), it would have gone unnoticed.

I plan to fire it back up in mid-February.
 
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Man, I wish I’d known of this then. Still, please make sure to update us of access info come February!
 
I've been working on revamping my stream, and at this point, I think I might as well just post it and hope for the best. Given the Lounge is only viewable by registered users, it ought to be safe enough as long as y'all don't go around spreading it everywhere.

You can find it in the Lounge.

The unencrypted version is tested and accessible on my Pismo running Mac OS 9.0.3 using Internet Explorer 4.5 (as expected, the IceCast status page is indecipherable, although it can correctly understand and download the m3u playlist) and Classilla 9.3.4b (which, unlike IE, can make some sense of the IceCast status page and render it relatively correctly).

I expect this would work on any platform that can connect to the internet and which has a viable means of interpreting and playing back MP3 streams.

I'm currently playing oldies, but it could really be anything, as long as it's not too new (with relatively few exceptions, my range tops out somewhere in the early 90s) or too hard (hard rock and metal are out! Same goes for modern rap/pop).

c
 
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