The Mormon Channel

[McDanielCA]

Have you seen the Mormon Channel? It is the official radio station of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You can stream online, listen in HDRadio in select locations, and even download podcasts!

Read this article from the LDS Newsroom for more info.

[russellhltn]

The link in the newsroom page is broken. There's a stray space (%20) at the end of the link.

[zabaki]

http://radio.lds.org/mc/eng/

[marianomarini]

http://radio.lds.org/mc/eng/

This means that in the future we could have http://radio.lds.org/mc/ita?

[Mikerowaved]

The link in the newsroom page is broken. There's a stray space (%20) at the end of the link.

I saw that a few minutes ago, but refreshed the page and it was fixed! Cleared my browser cache, reloaded, and it was broken again. Weird.

EDIT: OK, I was looking at different pages (duh). The link is still broken. I gave them a heads-up through their feedback page.

[MorettiDP]

And I hope an http://radio.lds.org/mc/por ?

But I can see a problem (again). Like in other new websites from Public Affairs (like that for California Preposition 8, new Mormon.org and others) the Church logo used have a problem. I believe this logo is maked with another font than the "official" font of the Church. You can see this above.



But it's only a detail. The project will be a great blessing, and we hope it in another languages.

[kylehart]

Does anybody have the URL for the actual MP3 stream? I'd like to set this up on an internet radio appliance, and not be forced to run from the Flash player on my PC.

[JamesAnderson]

Yes there are problems with 'customized players' and wifi radios, it's such taht a well-known service known as Accuradio can't be received directly although it's in .wma format. Basically if it's a bare stream with metadata telling title/artist or program/subject or host, that almost always works. With many players other than Winamp or Windows Media though, the player gums up the works.

Otherwise it won't work with Reciva powered radio databases, or Roku Soundbridges, or some of the other online databases and wifi radios that get their information on where to tune into URLs from those databases.

I've also encountered problems with it dropping after only a couple minutes on, although I'm on a medium-level (cable quality) DSL connection.

Edit: I spotted the reference to the station's player being built using Macromedia Flash. Those almost never work with wifi devices, so there will need to be an alternate URL for the stream for those. Another LDS-themed broadcaster found out the hard way too and provided one as part of the iPhone solution. They found that there are all kinds of iPhone apps that can pick up web radio streams, you just plug in a URL, and it will be among your choices, not everyone is going to want to download yet one more radio app.

[samliddicott]

Yes there are problems with 'customized players' and wifi radios, it's such taht a well-known service known as Accuradio can't be received directly although it's in .wma format. Basically if it's a bare stream with metadata telling title/artist or program/subject or host, that almost always works. With many players other than Winamp or Windows Media though, the player gums up the works.
...

It frustrates me when services launch in a dumbed down restricted mode, and ignore established standards.

If services would follow well supported standards then the service would be widely available anyway and the dumbed down mode could then be added on top of that. For instance a web-player may be nice, but windows users could listen in windows media player without one. When there is ONLY a flash based web player, it cuts out loads of people, and even encourages illicit online service reflectors - like the one I'm going to setup tonight with mplayer and shoutcast.

Of course if we only want 32bit/64bit windows users (and the odd sneaky linux users) to listen to the station then we did the right thing... but why would we want that?

What's more ironic is that the sort of people that get cut out of this service are the sort of people who are placed to be more vocal in these forums.

But I guess I have a few teeth left that I haven't worn out gnashing at move networks, that I can wear out gnashing at this.

Vatican radio on the other hand does it quite well:
http://www.radiovaticana.org/en1/diretta.asp

It supports wma, real (and mp3 in the left column) and no need for any freaky platform-restricted plugins.

Their on-demand is FAST and IMHO beats move networks:
http://www.radiovaticana.org/en1/on_demand.asp

(For sure, lets have move networks plugins for people who need it, but there's something wrong if thats all there is. And it is.)

If there was an html set of pages as an alternative to move networks, I predict that most people would use it because the move networks interface is too slow and awkward. And then we would have the data needed to encourage move networks to improve.

end-of-rant till this time next year.

[shawnlg-p40]

They say there will be an iPhone app soon. That would be nice. But if they supported standards-based streams, there would be no need - or at least people impatient for iPhone use could use one of the many existing players. I too am frustrated with the flash-based player being the only option. I guess I'll stick with BYU Radio for now.