Full list of CBC Radio 2 streaming “channel” URLs

Along with the re-launch of Radio 2, CBC created four new streaming “genre” channels: Classical, Jazz, Canadian Composers, and Canadian Songwriters. You may have heard the heavy advertisement for them on both CBC Radio 1 and 2. To hear these new channels, you have to listen at the Radio 2 website, or listen in iTunes under “Radio” in the sidebar.

But what do you do if you don’t want to leave a browser window open? Or if you’d rather stream using VLC, or WinAmp or something?

Because I can’t seem to find one anywhere else (including CBC’s own Windows-Media centric Direct CBC.ca URLs for listening to CBC Radio page), I’ve put together a full list of CBC Radio 2 streaming “channel” URLs list here:

Classical

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-canadianclassicalhi-192

Jazz

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-jazzhi-192

Canadian Composers

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-composershi-192

Canadian Songwriters

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-songwriterhi-192

How did I find these?

1. In the “Radio” section of iTunes, I browsed for each of the four channels
2. I dragged each of the stations into a new iTunes playlist
3. In the playlist I right clicked on each item, I clicked “Edit URL” and copied the URL (For example, the Canadian Songwriters URL was http://pri.kts-af.net/redir/index.pls?esid=6ae4b0420afe423a4f04585b4c0b1ed1&url_no=1&client_id=7&uid=68efed4d03ec7e45fd3978262c107180&clicksrc=xml)
4. I pasted that URL into Firefox, which downloaded a .pls file
5. I opened each .pls file in Textedit, which gave me the above URLs.

Interesting:

• Abacast (abacast.com) is an American company
• It looks like the Live Streaming service costs either $395 or $695 per month per channel, depending on the package
• Though the URLs (and iTunes Radio listings) suggest the bitrate is 192 kbps, my copy of VLC reports otherwise, between 112 and 160 kbps. Perhaps that’s a limitation of my broadband connection, though.
• Abacast lists complete listener statistics as part of its streaming audio packages. I wonder how many people are listening. I wonder if these numbers will ever become as public as BBM reports.