Full list of CBC Radio 2 streaming “channel” URLs
Update, 11 April 2012: This page is old, and the URLs don’t work anymore. You’re probably actually looking for my Full list of CBC Music direct URLs instead.
Update: CBC now has official lists:
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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?
- In the “Radio” section of iTunes, I browsed for each of the four channels
- I dragged each of the stations into a new iTunes playlist
- 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)
- I pasted that URL into Firefox, which downloaded a .pls file
- 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.