Streaming Client

SnackAmp provides the ability to play mp3 or ogg streams from any compatible server (e.g. Icecast, Shoutcast, SnackAmp, ..) To play a stream, you can either add a url manually or play one directly from your web browser. In both cases a special url shortcut file is created within your music collection. The usk shortcut file holds the url file location along with other pertinent information from the stream. 

usk Shortcut Files

Each shortcut file contains both the url of the stream source along with ID3 tag information that you can edit. By default, these files are placed in an http folder within your first music collection folder. You can later change the location from the settings menu -> folder settings. You can delete, move and otherwise treat the shortcut files as any other media file, the main difference is that playing a shortcut file will read the data from the specified http source rather than a local file.

Playing Streams from a Browser

By far the easiest way to play a streaming audio track is from a web browser. Shoutcast, Icecast, SnackAmp and a large number of other sites make this easy for you. What they have in common is selecting a stream will download a .pls or .m3u playlist file to your local temp folder, and depending on your configuration, will direct this file to your player to process. The playlist files contain one or more http sources for the stream. When SnackAmp is configured properly, it will read each track within the playlist file and automatically create a url shortcut file, append it to your SnackAmp playlist,  and attempt to play the first one.

Configuring Your Browser

Windows

Configuring Windows manually is a bit complicated, but from the Settings -> File Associations dialog you can associate both .m3u and .pls file types to SnackAmp. When you do so, clicking on these file types, either from a file, on a web site, will direct the playlists to SnackAmp.

Unix/Linux/OS-X

Associating files is windowing environment dependent, but if desired you can associate both .m3u, .pls (or any audio type) to launch SnackAmp from your file manager of choice. The example below shows you how to associate the .pls and .m3u file extensions from the Netscape Browser:

From Edit/Preferences Menu, Navigator/Applications Tab

Select: Create two new applications with the following parameters

Description Extension Mime Type Application
pls Playlist .pls audio/x-scpls snackAmp %s
m3u Playlist .m3u audio/x-mpegurl snackAmp %s

Using a Proxy

You can use a proxy to access remote music streams, to do so setup your Proxy Settings under the Settings -> Streaming Audio dialog. The Exclude patterns for local hosts entry allows you to enter a semi-colon listed name of domains that will not be access via the proxy. These would typically be names within your local network or inside a firewall within your company. You can enter names such as *.mycompany.com.