The situation is, I'm currently sorting my internet radio playlists. It's somehow sad foobar can't play the m$ streaming formats. Other free software can, like media player classic. I know wma and asx are a no-no, the reasons have been discussed.

Is implementing asx and mms protocol a technical problem as well or just a political?

The thing is, most real fm radio stations use microsoft formats or, even worse, realaudio. Only a few real fm radio stations have an mp3 stream, not to talk about vorbis. So for internet radio listeners, fb2k is not the tool of choice unfortunately.

So this is my wish for next christmas

.asx files are more or less playlists and one could fairly easily write an .asx loader.

Implementing mms:// isn't straightforward. To do it "right" (in the FB SDK sense), you'd have to write a mms:// protocol implementation (maybe use the VideoLan one if you don't mind GNU stuff), and then I guess you could let the internal FB Windows Media decoder handle it from there by faking an ASF extension and finding the WM decoder service.

Of course, there is always the "wrong" (easy) way of doing it (no proper filesystem support)... I don't know if the moderators here would let a component stay on the forums if it was built that way though. But it would only take a few hours to write (for someone who knows WM stuff).

So really I don't think it is a "problem"... it just isn't really easy to do right and no one has felt like giving the "easy" solution a try.

So I actually took a look at mms:// support this past weekend. Unfortunately, it seems Foobar's WMA player uses the Windows Media synchronous reader and not the asynchronous reader. This didn't seem like a problem at first, but as far as I can tell, the synchronous reader will not render a WMA marked as live. An asynchronous reader has no problem with the same stream, and given the fact the sync. reader doesn't natively support mms:// by itself, I'm guessing it's a limitation with using that method.

So unless I'm missing some trick, I don't think proper mms:// playback is possible in FB.

But thanks for having a look at it.