audiocommand linestreaming
There is an iMac in our lab at university, running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
It is never used, so we have taken to using it to play music, as we can SSH to it, and it does not require any permissions to play music (using afplay).
Is there any way to stream radio, or any other music stream from the command line?
I've seen that on a couple of them, and the problem seems to be tied to IPv6 support. Mine would drop connections randomly, sometimes requiring a reboot of the AirPort Express before it would return to the network.
Turning off IPv6 entirely in the Network Control panel of our Macs seems to have fixed it. I can stream music to it for hours now without problems, so give that a try.
I tried both streams like you did and at first I received the same results you did. BBC Radio 6 showed up in the music but The Current didn't appear to.
Then, I tried typing "The Current" into the iTunes search box while Music was selected in the sidebar. The result: The Current from Minnesota Public Radio pops up as the first and only search result in the iTunes main menu.
What I believe it that because this radio listing contains a blank album and artist field, iTunes gets a bit confused but ends up placing them "somewhere" amongst your other entries with blank album and/or artists fields. It can appear to be lost there because there doesn't appear to be any particular order those entries are sorted by-default. (I am almost certain you can do something about that if you really wanted.)
IF you are still interested in seeing your music with those streams, I would recommend just creating a smart playlist that excludes them. Try this a the rule to use in the smart playlist (Cmd-Opt-N to bring up its dialog, btw):
"(Kind) (is not) (Internet audio stream)"
Hope this was helpful.
-b
Best Answer
While not (strictly speaking) playing from the command line, you could use a set of AppleScripts (or AppleScript calls) wrapped in shell scripts to control a GUI player or website. In the likely case that the player or site doesn't directly support AppleScriptability, you can use AppleScript GUI scripting to control the mouse and keyboard.
If you're looking at a "normal" streaming radio station (i.e, one that has a downloadable file that specifies the stream), you can put that in iTunes and use its (relatively excellent) AppleScript dictionary to remotely control it.
With either option, if you want to get fancy, you can use remote scripting to send Apple Events from an arbitrary source machine to control your radio-iMac.