I am setting up foobar2000 as a media player for my parents. Ease of use is definitely a priority. One of the things I am trying to do is have a list of online radio stations within fb2k. Clicking on one of the stations in this list would play that radio station. Similar to the way iTunes does it. I am surprized to find that currently there is no good way to do this.

There are two reasons why simply creating a playlist with radio stations won't do:

1) Many (most?) major radio stations give you a playlist with multiple streams. These would have to be listed in the playlist along with the rest of radio stations, making it prohibitively difficult to find what you want.

2) It's currently impossible or too difficult to name a stream within a playlist.

What is necessary is a radio station browser that integrates into fb2k as a UI element. Within it, a user can create a new radio station by entering the station name and url/path to the station's stream or playlist of streams. Clicking on a name in the station list would cause foobar2000 to open the associated stream or playlist of streams.

I think easy handling of internet radio stations is a must for any player of fb2k's caliber, and I really hope someone out there would be willing to create such a plug-in for the community!

Yes, the www stream world is an evil world, with no unique tagging, various formats, embedding of embedded playlists etc. etc.

Currently you can only

- maintain station names with help of global variables. (with columns ui)
- have a playlist file be shown as one target only in case of microsoft streams (foo_input_mslive).

I finally ended in a ton of code to have it work properly. But still the problem remains with non MS streams, that fb2k cannot display a playlist file as one entry and do the resolving part internally.

Thanks for the reply!

It is good to know that columns ui can help, though probably not for my parents. They will surely duck and cover when they hear the term "global variable".



Having a playlist file appear as a single entry in fb2k's playlist is something I had thought about, but it is not what I had in mind. Its OK, probably even good to have all the streams in a radio station playlist appear in fb2k's playlist, as they do now. What is missing is a separate UI element (sort of like the album list panel, for lack of a better analogy), that is a list of various radio stations. Clicking on any of these would add all the associated streams to foobar's playlist.

I suppose it might be simpler, better, and more flexible to just make a foo_favorites type of plug-in, that would basically be a list of shortcuts to various frequently-accessed files, playlists, and/or streams. Users would be able to rename, add, and remove these links as necessary.

If you want ease of use, you can create a playlist for each station: you'll have a few rather obscure entries in each playlist, but your parents will be able to play that station selecting the first or second entry.

It works for me (but, then again, I only use a handful of stations).

Of course a plug-in handling all this in a proper way would be welcome.

Alessandro