I was poking around in the shell, and ran the "play" program in /empeg/bin. I got the output:

empeg command line player. ( mp3 wma wave http )

Does that mean that the "play" program can play streams? I tried to give it the URL of a few shoutcast streams, but without luck. Does anyone know what the "http" refers to?

It might be able to -- I hacked that in there a while ago. It's probably not been tested recently, so it's likely to have been broken (and didn't work all that well in the first place).

First thing: you need to ensure that your Central has good connectivity to the outside world. To be specific, you should be able to ping the shoutcast host successfully.

After that, try pointing the play program at a .pls file via http (which is basically how Shoutcast works). It ought to grab the .pls file and then start streaming MP3 data from the first URL listed therein.

Alternatively, try pointing it directly at an MP3 stream.

It's not a supported program, so don't expect any other support.

Yes, since this is a discontinued player I'm not expecting any support. Thanks for your time in answering my question!!

You nailed it, I had broken DNS resolution somehow last night, so the hostnames didn't resolve. After I fixed that, "play" complained that it couldn't find the proper codec.

So I've gone in a completely different direction. Madplay (after judiciously commenting out some lines) works well, and some pipes finish the work.

curl -s <streamhere> | tee song.mp3 | madplay -v -

I'm thinking of making a nice front-end for this and slapping a choice in the "games" menu to facilitate selecting / entering shoutcast streams.

Has anyone else added some features into their central?

---------
Instructions to get madplay working with the hardcoded 2 channel 44.1kHz sound:

audio_oss.c
if (ioctl(sfd, SNDCTL_DSP_SYNC, 0) == -1) {
//audio_error = ":ioctl(SNDCTL_DSP_SYNC)";
//return -1;
}

Sweet... Looking forward to this!!...

Sean in NC

Yes, since this is a discontinued player I'm not expecting any support.

True, but my point was that, even had the Central still been a supported product, the 'play' binary is on there only to help the developers in testing stuff, so it wouldn't have been supported anyway. Of course, as you say, this is all moot now.

Oh, I did not realize that "play" isn't used by the system. I suppose that means that I can't replace it with a hacked up "play" program. Thanks! You easily saved me a few hours.

BTW, are there any C++ or SDL guys out there who are interested in facilitating (i.e. answering some of my stupid questions) this? I'm a java guy, so C++ and SDL are kicking my butt.