No CBC Music in Canada …. on Squeezebox Radio!

For the last year and a bit, I’ve been the happy owner of a Logitech Squeezebox Radio.

I am still happy. I use it to listen to my favorite far away radio stations in super clear digital sound and of course without needing to turn on a computer. Some of the stations I listen to include NOLA’s heritage radio station wwoz.org, heartland public radio (hpr.org) and classicandjazz.net from Paris, France. I also listen to local stations like Jazz.FM and their associated special web streams. In fact I use the squeezebox radio as my wake up alarm.

The way this works is to create a list of favorite radio streams on a logitech run website: mysqueezebox.com, to which squeezebox radio connects. There are other ways to use the radio, but these others ways are not relevant to this blog post.

Among the local stations I listen to once in a while are those of the mother corp, otherwise called the CBC (canadian broadcasting corp). CBC has three radio networks, CBC 1,(news and public affairs), CBC Radio 2 (music) and CBC 3 also music. The direct streams for all these broadcasts are available on the CBC website and play well on the computer (using my favorite media player VLC, from videolan.org ) as well as on the squeezebox radio.

CBC also has web only music streams. Until just a few months ago, there were only 4: classical, jazz, singer-songwriter and canadian composer. Now they expanded and there are nearly 40 of them in a service called CBC Music.. The list is at http://www.cbc.ca/radio/# . . and also at http://misener.org/archives/1266 Now with so many new streams, I thought I could add more variety to my squeezebox radio and particularly to use for my wake-up alarm. So I put those streams into the favorites at mysqueezebox.com and turned the radio on. Instead of hear the great music, I get this: “403 Forbidden”. That was a head scratcher. The stream plays well on vlc, but not in squeezebox radio! I was stymied.

And, here are the direct URL links one of the new web only music streams: CBC Jazz Canada
http://playerservices.streamtheworld.com/pls/CBC_JAZCDN_H.pls
which contains
http://2773.live.streamtheworld.com:3690/CBC_JAZCDN_H_SC
http://2773.live.streamtheworld.com:80/CBC_JAZCDN_H_SC
http://2773.live.streamtheworld.com:3690/CBC_JAZCDN_H_SC
http://2773.live.streamtheworld.com:443/CBC_JAZCDN_H_SC

Just looking at the direct URLs of the streams that work in both vlc and squeezebox (like CBC Radio 1) and those working on vlc but not squeezebox (like CBC Radio Jazz), I could see no obvious clues for the problem.

Now stymied, it was time to google.
I searched for “cbc music streams forbidden”.

The Sixth hit was: Re: [Banshee-List] Is there something wrong with this stream?
There, the writer, Martin, was saying that the none of the CBC streams worked. The responder, Bertrand Lorentz confirmed that the CBC music streams gave a 403:Forbidden error. He points out that http://music.cbc.ca/#/faq/faq.aspx says that “some stations are restricted to Canada”. Indeed, the answer to Question 11 is

Unfortunately, CBC Music’s rights agreements do not allow the majority of our 40 online radio streams to broadcast outside of Canada. There are 3 stations that you can listen to worldwide: CBC Radio 2, CBC Radio 3, and CBC Records.

But I AM in canada! So……

Eureka: The Squeezebox Radio is connected to mysqueezebox.com which is located outside Canada. So it was mysqueezebox.com that was forbidden from receiving the music channels, and my squeezebox radio was downstream.

The solution then for this problem would be to establish a squeezebox server in Canada, like on my Network-Attached Storage device, the dns-323.
Puzzle solved

9 thoughts on “No CBC Music in Canada …. on Squeezebox Radio!”

Well Squeezebox doesn’t support iHeartRadio in the States either so at least you can take comfort in knowing it sucks just as bad on both sides of the border. I think Logitech threw in the towel on this product some time ago, the developers really don’t seem to care about developing it any more.

GeorgeTheCIC says:

May 1, 2012 at 12:02 am

I’m not sure at your analogy. In what way Squeezebox could support iHeartRadio, but doesn’t? As an App? Well, they support TuneIn which seems to cover the same ground as iHeartRadio. Or what do you have in mind.

In fact I think Squeezebox is a great product. I wished it was even better, but I have no basis to complain.

cheers.

gc

Reply

Wow.. great info. I was trying to figure it out for myself. While I was crafty enough to figure out the streams, I couldn’t figure out why when playing via a favourite on my local server it worked, but trying to plugin the same URL on mysqueezebox.com it didn’t work.
This makes sense. It’s annoying, since I liked the idea of not needing to keep a server up to simply run internet radio, but it is what it is.

With this knowledge, I suppose I can exploit it to get streams to US stations that I wouldn’t normally get in Canada 🙂

I’m glad you could use this info. Now I’m curious, what US stations are you interested in, and were you able to play them with the squeezebox?

As to the streams available through http://www.iheart.com/ I couldn’t play them with squeezebox, but they work with hotspot shield (www.hotspotshield.com) loaded.

This is a post I made in another forum – for now it works for me. At some point I’ll probably dedicate a cheap , low power netbook running LMS that I leave on 24/7 because I do like to listen to some of CBC’s classical streams when I go to bed.
Unless somebody comes up with another solution….

“After many months agonizing over trying to get the new(and some of the old) CBC web music streams to work on my touch and radio ,I’ve found a fix of sorts.
A while back some of the CBC streams that I had saved in favorites stopped working giving me the “not found in playlist” error message. Some worked , some didn’t, and at the time didn’t make sense. Around the same time one of my desktop computers ( the one hosting LMS) went down and I’ve been too busy to get it back online. It also hosted ALL of my music but I had a backup drive with said music that I plugged in to my laptop…whew! Today the penny dropped while searching for work-arounds for the CBC streams and somebody suggested installing LMS on a NAS which worked for him, I’ve just realized with the desktop down so was my local LMS. With the touch connecting to a local LMS through the laptop and not mysqueezebox.com (ie. when the laptop/desktop is off) I was able to listen to ALL CBC had to offer. Unfortunately , it means leaving a computer on if you want to listen to these streams.”

It’s disappointing that this problem [I too used to listen to CBC2 “the Signal” when I went to bed] has never been fixed. No more Logitech products for me.

I now listen to CBC2 [the Signal][ with my laptop and use the Squeezebox for sound as it has a much better speaker

Ed,
The problem or issue is not with Logitech, rather it is with copyright law and CBC. Basically, CBC blocks some of its streams outside Canada, and the Logitech server (mysqueezebox.com) is located in the US.

However, there is a solution: Just Install a Logitech Media Server (LMS) (http://mysqueezebox.com/download) on your computer or NAS (Network Attached Storage) device and enter into it the URL for your favorite CBC stream, and listen to it on the Logitech.

You can also install the CBC applet on the LMS, and save yourself the trouble of entering the CBC streams’ URLs one by one.

restarting my router gave me back CBC FM

9 thoughts on “No CBC Music in Canada …. on Squeezebox Radio!”

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