If you don’t own a Sonos media player, or you don’t like CBC Radio, this post is not for you. Everyone else — and I can probably count you on the fingers of one hand, since Sonos’ pricing is still so screwed up in Canada — read on.
Sonos is pretty good at playing streaming Internet radio stations. However, you might run into a bug whereby Sonos can’t connect to CBC Radio One. Here’s how to fix it:
The Quick Fix
Go to the Radio section in the Sonos controller, click "Add New", and use the following URLs instead of the ones CBC publishes:
CBC Radio 1 Atlantic (Halifax) is http://mfile2.akamai.com/9617/live/reflector:36748.asx?bkup=36749
CBC Radio 1 Central (Winnipeg) is http://mfile2.akamai.com/9617/live/reflector:36807.asx?bkup=36808
CBC Radio 1 Eastern (Toronto) is http://mfile2.akamai.com/9617/live/reflector:36859.asx?bkup=36860
CBC Radio 1 Pacific (Vancouver) is http://mfile2.akamai.com/9617/live/reflector:36748.asx?bkup=36749
Note these URLs are not guaranteed to keep on working. CBC might change ‘em. If this happens, bug Sonos or CBC, don’t bug me. Or read further to find out how you can fix this yourself.
Under the Hood / Teach a Man to Fish
Sonos appears to have trouble extracting the correct music stream information from the Windows Media .ASX playlists that CBC publishes. You can work around this by manually extracting the URL from each playlist. Reciva Radio Portal explains how:
Microsoft WMA Streams - Playlists
- Playlists are often used to deliver content.
- These are basically just text files with lists of direct audio URLs inside.
- Microsoft playlists have a .asx file extension. An example ASX playlist is shown below.
- If you are running Linux you can retrieve playlists using wget
(e.g. wget "http://player.virginradio.co.uk/core/audio/wmp/live.asx?source=playerv4&service=grbb")
Windows users can also use wget - just type "wget for windows" into Google and it should take you to a download page.
The ASX playlist format is documented on microsoft.com. In summary, the direct audio URLs are always in a line that starts "< ref href".
2 responses so far ↓
Paul Vallee // July 16, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Thanks Osh! This works a treat.
The CBC Radio One Ottawa feed is http://mfile2.akamai.com/9617/live/reflector:36905.asx?bkup=36906.
Cheers
Paul
Oshoma Momoh // September 14, 2008 at 8:08 am
The URL for CBC Radio 2 Toronto is:
http://mfile2.akamai.com/9617/live/reflector:36813.asx?bkup=36814
See all the CBC Radio 2 stream URLs here: http://www.cbc.ca/listen/streams.html#radio2
You can ‘wget’ any one of these to dig out the embedded akamai URL that will work on Sonos. E.g. ‘wget http://www.cbc.ca/livemedia/cbcr2-toronto.asx‘, then open up the resulting file with notepad and copy/paste the URL into Sonos.
Like gas stations in rural Texas after 10 pm, comments are closed.