This post is a little out-of-context for this blog, however, it may be useful for other Irish people who, like myself, are living abroad.

RTÉ, as the Public Service Broadcaster of Ireland, is one of the main sources of news about Ireland. If you want to listen to RTÉ Radio 1, you can use their internet service. This is fine for tuning in occassionally, but it’s rather limiting to have to be in the same room as your computer.

Well, recently I had bought the much vaunted Apple AirPort Express to listen to an audio stream of my MP3s and podcasts in iTunes from another room. I’m going to pick up an old version of the iPod Touch to use it as a remote control for iTunes. The iTunes Remote application for the iPhone / iPod Touch do nicely for that.

The problem? iTunes doesn’t support any of the audio stream formats that RTÉ offer. I tried to solve the problem by converting the audio stream to a format supported by iTunes using VLC. The quality was ok but I wasn’t completely satisfied.

Finally, I found a solution that removes the weakest link (iTunes). Winamp and MediaMonkey can both directly read wma audio streams. I found a plugin that works with both players and is capable of streaming to the AirPort Express:
the Remote Speakers Output Plug-In.

MediaMonkey happens to be my favourite app for organising audio files, so I installed it as a MediaMonkey plugin, although, I imagine most people would go for Winamp.

MediaMonkey can read RTÉ’s wma audio stream (currently mms://live2.rte.ie/wmtencoder/1516.wma).

I’m listening to RTÉ Radio 1 right now. It sounds fine and is stable so far.

The disadvantages of the plug-in:

• It’s shareware so I’ll start by trying it out for the 14 day trial period, but at $10 (currently €7.50), the license isn’t expensive.
• Another downside is that the iTunes Remote application, which I’m planning to use on an iPod Touch, won’t work with Winamp or MediaMonkey, however, a remote control won’t really be necessary for just listening to a radio stream.