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I’ve recently had need to stream local radio over the Internet. In the course of doing so I discovered many of my local stations in Hobart stream their content, but unfortunately they don’t all do so in Mac-friendly style. You see, instead of using an iTunes-friendly format, several of them have elected to use the Windows Media Format.

This doesn’t prevent the stream been played on a Mac, as it is still possible to play the stream in QuickTime with the Flip4Mac Windows Media plug-in installed. But it does mean that it’s hard to keep shortcuts to them all in the one place (generally you’d do this in iTunes, which as I’ve already noted isn’t possible for the Windows Media steams).

To over come this (and practicing the fine art of procrastination—I’ve got lots of other things I should be doing) I’ve brushed up on my AppleScript and written an applet that displays a list of Hobart radio stations that stream over the Internet and then connects to the station the user selects. The applet can be downloaded below:

Hobart Radio Applet

The applet functions just like a regular application, so you can drop it on your desktop, or place it in your Applications folder, and then double-click it to run. You can even place a shortcut in your dock.

As previously mentioned, for it to work you will need to have the Flip4Mac plug-in installed. I have also only tested it on a Snow Leopard system (using Quicktime X), so it’s possible it may not function correctly with older systems. Should you run into any problems, or have any suggestions, please feel free to let me know in the comments (although as an extremely infrequent AppleScripter I can’t promise I’ll be able to fix any problems!).