TUAW Tips: Play internet radio in background on your iPad

Those of us who love to stream internet radio on our iPads can quickly turn into ogres when we switch to another app and the music stops. Until the iPad supports iOS 4 (soon) we're stuck with no background capability, which makes background streaming impossible.The folks over at FairerPlatform have come up with an easy way to listen to many of your favorite streams without a need to jailbreak your iPad or wait fruitlessly for Flash to make an appearance on the platform. While this trick won't work for every streaming Internet radio station -- Pandora is a perfect example of this -- it does work with others like Live365.

What you need to do is find a radio-only stream that is playable in Safari, start playing the stream, and then go on to those other apps while listening to your music. As an example, FairerPlatform cites Soma FM, a San Francisco-based, user-supported internet radio station. Their music is available in the pls multimedia playlist format, which the iPad's Safari plays without a hitch. Once you've started the stream, you can do any other work you need to and the stream plays on in the background.

If you're a fan of any of the live shows on the TWIT network, you can listen to those shows in background as well. Just point Safari to live.twit.tv, tap "Live Audio Stream," and then you can listen to their shows while doing real work instead of looking at Leo's face. TWIT AM uses the m3u format, which also loves Mobile Safari. It seems that most of the internet radio streams using pls or m3u work beautifully with Safari.

Of course, this doesn't work with every radio station, internet or otherwise. I tried to see if a local radio station's coverage of the Colorado Rockies would stream -- nope, they use a Flash player. But this is a good trick to know until we're able to run the native streaming players as a background process on the iPad in a few days or months.

View Tags

Source: http://fairerplatform.com/2010/08/how-to-background-stream-i…

Categories

TUAW Tips iPad

Those of us who love to stream internet radio on our iPads can quickly turn into ogres when we switch to another app and the music stops....

Add a Comment

Sign in »

16 Comments

Filter by:

Montana Leet

A couple people above have mentioned radio apps that will load the stream in Safari for you, but I've found "TuneIn Radio" to be my fave. It does that, but it also has a host of other features that are brilliantly put together. It looks good in 2x on the iPad, but what look great if Apple allowed it to be used in its native retina display resolution. :-p

August 29 2010 at 9:01 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

tdowling

Is it possible to just jailbreak and use the Backgrounder app, or is that just for the iPhone? I use that method primarily to keep AOL Radio in the background (they haven't updated it in ages) and it really does the job.

August 29 2010 at 3:38 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to tdowling's comment

MJedi

Yes, Backgrounder works on the iPad, too.

August 30 2010 at 10:53 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Richard

What's the point of this 'work around'? iTunes already plays in the background (so you can use Safari for something more useful) and it has Radio support built-in. iTunes also supports Open Audio Stream, if you know the url, and you can play any Podcasts as a live stream from the iTunes Store without downloading it first.

August 29 2010 at 2:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

silvio

A great app, "WunderRadio" does background streaming, i used this with my ipod touch 2nd gen, and it would open the station in a window in safari and it would play as a quicktime file, pretty awesome feature, but after ios4, no need for it.

August 29 2010 at 1:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

kohlmannj

Just a heads up: I was pleasantly surprised that the iOS app TuneMark has a button that sends the currently playing Internet radio stream off to Safari for this exact purpose. Pretty nice feature, actually, since it takes a bit of the legwork out of the equation.

August 29 2010 at 12:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to kohlmannj's comment

Eric

WunderRadio does this as well.

August 29 2010 at 1:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

iBearTouch

I can't understand why apple allows to mainstream iOS devices to run different versions of it's OS, I hope this thing is settled on Sept 1. It basically undercuts the enjoyment value of my larger more expensive device!

It's like saying my Mac Mini or MacBook is running one OS but Mac Pro gets another more souped up OS. Makes no sense to me.

August 29 2010 at 12:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

3 replies to iBearTouch's comment

McIntoshmc

You can play espn radio in the background as well. They had that feature far before OS4.

August 29 2010 at 12:10 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Rdnymllnsktr

Old news. This was already reported, not too long after iOS 3.1 was released, for the iPhone.

August 29 2010 at 11:56 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Rdnymllnsktr's comment

tdowling

I think that's why it's labeled as a "tip" and not "news"

August 29 2010 at 3:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tom

Oh, steven, steven, steven. Neither one of them use "pls" or "m3u", they use shoutcast streaming and the pls/m3u are just playlist (hence pls, m3u is mp3 somethinganother) files that tell the client what the shoutcast server info is. And iTunes doesn't support the m3u from wrek.org, but if I paste the URL to the server (opening the m3u as a txt file, copy pasting the contents) in the iTunes -> Advanced -> Open Audio Stream window, it works fine.

It's possible to use pls files to show windows media files, which don't work at all in Mobile Safari. That's the point I'm trying to make. Oh well.

August 29 2010 at 11:26 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Tom's comment

Almo

Easier than that, just grab Pocket Tunes Radio app, lists pretty much absolutely everything and will allow you to play in background by generating a link and auto-opening Safari for you, nifty!

August 29 2010 at 11:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply