As you may know, I love making little internet radios from Raspberry Pi computers – mostly so I can listen to the wonderful French radio station Fip. Fip plays a mixture of jazz, left-field rock and pop, classical music – it’s hard to describe, but it is my favourite radio station in the world.
My little internet radio in the kitchen stopped working, and it turns out Fip’s streaming URL has changed – you can now find it at http://audio.scdn.arkena.com/11016/fip-midfi128.mp3
Update Feb 2020: now at http://icecast.radiofrance.fr/fip-midfi.mp3
When BBC radio changed its streaming methods recently, it took a huge amount of detective work for me to find out how to play BBC radio – which I’ve paid for as part of the licence fee – on my internet radios. More recently, Apple launched its own radio services, and I found it was impossible to listen to its Beats1 station at launch on a brand new MacBook. Even last night, I updated iTunes to the latest version and found that while I could get Beats1 to play, none of the links to genre-specific ‘featured stations’ did anything at all. Not one. Were they ALL off air at 10pm UK time?
Fip, on the other hand, actually want you to listen. They have this lovely page outlining a myriad of listening options: on FM in different French cities, on their web site, via Android and iOS apps, via satellite and finally, via a direct streaming URL. That’s the way to do it.
Yes its a great station with great music, I can receive it on my Internet Radio (Pure One Flow) My Smartphone via Tunein and their Website. I have noticed that several stations have changed from Media Player to MP3 and when that happens there is a short gap when its not received but is always comes back after a short break. A good example of that was FIP, others like Radio 5 in the Netherlands and WDR4 and SWR4 in Germany were not there for a few days but came back. If you have lost any station they usually come back eventually in their new format.