Keilly: Listen Again - Last Broadcast

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Listen Again - Last Broadcast

Looks like the ListenAgain widget has played it's last tune.

The widget works by gathering the radio programme information from the iPlayer website. Sometimes the BBC changes the layout of the iPlayer site slightly forcing me to tweak the widget to adapt to the new layout. Unfortunately this time it looks like the changes were much larger, at least internally, and I can't seem to find the URL for the Real Audio stream of each programme. In fact it doesn't look like they use Real Audio at all anymore - only Flash.

This spells the end for the widget I think, from now on you'll have to listen directly with iPlayer.

13 comments:

happydude said...

Hmm, but thanks for your efforts in the past;-)

Have a good one!

Anonymous said...

What a shame. It was a great widget. Hope you can find a way to get it working again. Thanks again for the effort you have put into it in the past.

Anonymous said...

Fantastic widget - the very basis of the genre - incredibly simple to use, but with a utility that was really valued. Really sorry to see it go, but many thanks for all your efforts!

Anonymous said...

It's sad news, I would Just like to say THANK YOU for this widget. Your free time spent coding it has made quite a few people happier during their weekend mornings :).

Pete said...

My favourite widget is dead? That is very sad but as the others have said, thanks for your work to date. Good luck.

yooperguy said...

I add my thanks for your efforts in keeping this great widget going. Like the other commenters, I guess that I will be forced to endure withdrawl symptoms. If there is even a remote chance that you can revive it, I, like many others, I am sure, would be very appreciative.

mr. m said...

Same here, much appreciation for all your effort that made Listen Again a great & my personal no 1 widget. Thanks & all the best!

Christopher_Harwood said...

Would the links maintained atiPlayer Real Converter help at all? From the site's main page: "This site aims to provide a solution to those of us missing the ease of use of the old RealPlayer-based BBC Radio Player, which has now been subsumed into the BBC iPlayer. Moreover, there are many devices that still don't support the new iPlayer technology, so rely on the old way of doing things."

nik said...

ta, it was great, thanks for all your effort!

Anonymous said...

It was indeed a perfect widget. And on my Mac it was THE widget.

Anonymous said...

According to iplayer real converter there is a way to convert a pid to a realaudio stream. The site says Realaudio will be available until early 2010 when WMA streams will take over.

Perhaps the neatly designed widget will ride again?

Neil Cochrane said...

The Real Audio streams are mostly gone, the rest are going very soon.
On the weekend I took a look at trying to adjust the widget to using the new Flash based transport (containing WMA/mp3/AAC). Finding the new id of each programme was doable, but converting the id into a controlable stream proved too much. iPlayer now uses lots of Javascript, probably generated automatically. Hard to hack in the hooks required, and even if possible I think it would be very fragile and break with minor changes in the iPlayer.

But if anyone knows how to convert a PID into a controllable stream in the Flash plugin then let me know.

Anonymous said...

Well thanks for all the effort. I always looked forward to using it.