Striptuner
Striptuner is an Internet Radio Stream Player and Tuner application for Windows.Striptuner represents one of the more unusual and interesting applications I have developed so far. It all started in early 2005 as a response to the frustrating inability for someone to create a reliable bookmark to a Shoutcast radio station. The early design of their station directory recycled inactive station identifiers so that every time a station went off line (maintenance, upgrades, host changes, whatever), and then came back online, it had a new unique station ID thereby rendering old bookmarks useless.
I started by creating a directory aggregation and search mechanism that used the old genre, bit rate, media type, and station name keywords to locate new instances of the station in the directory. Alas! I now had a pretty good way to create a list of favorite stations and quickly find any station’s connection and "now playing" information.
Once I had this functionality the other features snowballed from there and it eventually became a very robust station tuner, media player interface, track shuffler and filter, play list creator, and more. Striptuner also represents my first complex heterogenous\hybrid software architecture that seemlessly integrated web data and services with robust desktop functionality. The Striptuner Sidebar Gadget was an offshoot of this original foray into the realm of online digital music.
Feature Summary:
- Aggregates multiple online directories for Shoutcast or Icecast internet radio broadcasters hosting literally tens of thousands of free internet radio stations.
- Pre-select Shoutcacst genres to target favorite types of music.
- Pre-select HTTP ports to insure streams can be played through corporate firewalls.
- Automatically save Station Lists locally for increased performance. Refresh directories at any time with a mouse click. Filter and sort the list by stream type, media type, bitrate, genre, etc.,
- Perform simple or advanced searches against online directories using keyword criteria, mouse-clickable quick-filter criteria, field-specific criteria or a combination of all three.
- Keep track of favorite streams. Refresh and retain stream URLs for stations that change servers or re-register under different Station IDs.
- Play audio streams using your favorite media player applications like Winamp® &, VideoLan VLC® , Windows Media Player, Quintessential Player, Real Player, etc.
- Track frequently accessed stations by reviewing playback history.
- Create radio station playlists in all popular formats, save them to disk, open them later, share them with others.
- Enable track buffering to enable navigation forward or backward between tracks, fast forward or backward within a track, shuffle tracks from multiple stations, or automatically include or exclude tracks by artist, track, genere, size, or duration.
- Search, sort, tag, organize in playlists, and listen to other local audio files on the computer using popular media player applications.