Online Radio – Cordahi.net

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

Category: Online Radio

No CBC Music in Canada …. on Squeezebox Radio!