MACNJ Forum

ronni · Joined: 11 Aug 2006 Posts: 12 Location: Plainfield, NJ

Hi anybody,

Pretty sure the answer to this is a "no", but I figure I'd give it a whirl anyway.

Since we have 3 phone lines and a very, very tight budget, we have the dark ages for our internet -- dial-up, which is never really that inconvenient for our needs.

Is it absolutely an impossibility to listen to the internet (radio, archived speeches, etc.) with dial-up without the little slow spurts of sound? Or is there a way of letting it completely (of course slowly) download and save to my desktop, and go back later and listen to it all at once in QuickTime, whatever?

My husband has his PC connected to the same modem connection (when I'm not using it), and listens to music all at once from the internet, so I'm wondering why can't I listen to a voice transmission that's complete instead of in sections? If it matters, the Mac I use for the internet has Panther. I have Quicktime Player 6.0.3.

Thanks, Ronni

erikaeick · Guest

Ronni, I'm sure there are tools to capture internet radio files but I don't know of any myself.

I have an old (year 2000-400Mhz) G4 Sawtooth with OSX Tiger that is pretty decent at internet radio using our 1.5 MBps DSL connection. Internet video can be choppy at times on my Mac, especially the Apple Events broadcasts & iTunes TV shows. That is due to my Mac being a bit too slow to process the newer codecs being used to compress video as well as having an older nVidia 32 Mb video card. The same broadcasts work much better on my Intel 2.4 Ghz PC which has 1 Gb RAM & a 256Mb nVidia 6600 card. So your hardware is one factor, another factor would be having more RAM installed, lastly having broadband wouldn't hurt either. John & I had a choice of DSL speeds, and some of the packages with lower speeds were very affordable.

I'm sure some of the techies here would know more tips to eeking out more from your Mac.

Erika Eick

wpwoodall · Guest

Quicktime is not exactly the most efficient system for handling an audio-only stream. It is optimized for about 256 kbit/sec speeds... on the PC we have RealPlayer which runs fine at 32 kbit/sec.

If you are in Verizon territory you should know that there is a price war going on between Verizon and Cablevision. Verizon's low-end DSL is down around $25/month, or about the same price as a separate voice line and ISP connection - and you will have bandwidth to spare to share the line with a couple of systems.

chod · Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 12:16 am Post subject: radio

Hi Ronni,
I have broadband but I did a quick search and it seems that AOL radio which is free has a dialup preference so you could try that.

What happens when you use iTunes? Have you tried to download a podcast? If you can get the station to stream to your computer you could record it with either WireTap Pro or RadioLover 1.1

You could also download RealPlayer and listen to the stream from there, I think.

My nephew has dialup. I'll check with him next time we talk and see if he has any idea of what could help you.

Take care.

-Chod