Streaming CBC Radio in iTunes

Last week CBC radio’s streaming feed stopped working on my Mac, and it turns out they changed their streaming format and switched to the Abacast CDN. Their stream used to be in WMV format, but now they’re sending MP3. Unfortunately they haven’t updated their instructions for OS X on their stream page yet. Flip4Mac is no longer required, and iTunes can open the stream directly (yay!). Here’s how to set up the new stream using Firefox (Safari should be similar):

  1. Open the stream you want from the list on their “Listen” page.
  2. In the popup window, click the link for the stream bit rate you want.
  3. Right click on the popup window, and select “View Page Info” from the context menu.
  4. Click on the “Media” tab and copy down the “embed” URL. In my case it is http://icy1.abacast.com/cbc-r1vancouver-96.
  5. Create a plain text file called “cbc.m3u” containing only the URL from the previous step. Here is mine. Alternatively you can press command-U to play the stream directly.
  6. Drag the file you created into iTunes, and you’re done!

Update: CBC has updated their stream links page, and the URLs they supply seem to work now. Continue to ignore the Flip4Mac instructions on the “Listen” page though.

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Published:
25.05.09 / 6pm
Category:
nerdery