Ha! That’s very exciting.
The shows do not–right now–but that’s not a final decision. We are most concerned that a user interface suitable for browsing a handful of favorite stations is probably not right for browsing potentially many more archived shows…and that if we eventually solve the shows problem well, it will create a migration issue to have a bunch of people out there with show data formatted like station data.
That makes complete sense to me. I thought I’d throw a couple of those links in to see if they’d fly, but really all I personally need to no longer need to keep moving my Squeezeboxen back and forth from one teat to another is the ability to play a couple of live-radio streams (a main WFMU one and the one for the Drummer stream), and if it turns out any of our listeners use something as fancy as Roon, the full set of our streams would do it for them, for live listening. As you imply, live stream URLs are the sort of thing people would want to keep in a ready long-term directory for frequent re-use, while single-show links would presumably be used just the once. A really pleasing and well-thought-out interface for browsing and playing available archived shows is clearly beyond the scope of the upcoming release.
Should that sort of thing be likely to make it onto your roadmap eventually, I’d be glad to share (off-list) the feeds we have available which provide archive URLs, show descriptions, and timestamped track info, so you can decide if what we have available fits well enough in with whatever general approach you’d expect to take to make folding us into your support practical.
Besides (back to my own selfish case), I’m a big cheater. When I personally plan to listen to archived shows, I don’t actually stream them - I bring the 48/24 FLACs home on a USB stick. And that’s been working great with Roon - drop 'em in a watched directory and there they are!
There is a lot of WNYC listening in my household and we receive it over FM because the internet stream quality is so unbearable. […] To add insult to injury, some of the musical programs that need the bandwidth the most (Jonathan Schwartz, A Prairie Home Companion), run at the even-lower-than-usual bitrate that they switch to on the weekends. It’s 2016. I don’t get it.
Right? I don’t get it either. I mean… bandwidth is one of our biggest operating costs, but it’s the cost of sharing our shows in an engagingly musical way, so it’s not optional. And those auto-playing promos whenever you start playing a WNYC stream - or start re-playing it if it drops for a second - are an actively listener-hostile slap in the face. Oh, the swearing they have caused.
