Advisory of Unexpected Behavior in Extreme Case of Delayed Internet Radio Stream [Noted]

[rossbennett 2]

Nutty as it might seem, some of the best music radio stations are in southeast Europe. At the same time it's long-familiar technology with a reinvented personage.

 

But anyway. Tuning in on them can do a little bit of a beachball on iTunes—waiting up to two minutes to get a solid network handshake, buffering and stream.  And while it isn't strictly a bug, it does possibly make the user think it's all unresponsive.

 

Here's how you can set it up and replicate things.

 

One of the best stations in the region is AlphaRadio in Sofia, Bulgaria. (Their website is not needed for the demo, but it's http://alpharadio.bg .)

 

ON that site they offer an m3u file for plugging their feed into iTunes.

 

Launch that and iTunes will gobble it up and create a playlist called "Internet Songs" listing the stations described in the m3u.

 

Now use the Mini Player and fire up playlists. Now, if you're like me, you'll be intrigued by "Internet Songs," so select that.  Problem is, the beach ball iTunes is displaying isn't being shown, so it can appear the iTunes Mini Player has gone off the rails.  In fact, it's just waiting for the beach ball iTunes gave it and will be back in one to two minutes.

 

Once the connection comes through, it's not clear what the UI should be presenting. Sometimes it hangs around, unaware that a connection has been made. Other times it disappears in the same fashion as having launched any usual song.

 

So.

 

Can't imagine this can really be a high priority. There aren't going to be a lot of Alfred Using Texans tuning into Bulgarian Dance Club Electronica.  (In fact, 100% of the population may already be following this discussion thread.) I'm going to be initiating streams through a different method, since the steps above will only stream the first station in the playlist.

 

Certainly don't put much effort into this. iTunes developers never really understand how to handle or present streaming radio, so their presentation and behavior changes more often than any other module, I think.

I really only submit this so you'll have a notion how things are behaving in the extreme cases.

 

Looks good from here!

[Vero 366]

This is something we are aware of but, in many ways, is a limitation of using AppleScript to control iTunes. The way Alfred interacts with iTunes allows us to keep the performance high for every other function, but does have minor downsides like this.

 

I've made a note so that Andrew can look into this after v2.0 is released