How to listen to Sirius online radio with Linux or OSX.
By Mike on Mar 17, 2008 in Featured, How to, Linux, OSX, Software
I never thought I would actually pay for radio until a co-worker of mine signed up for Sirius satellite radio when Howard Stern made the switch to Sirius. Now, Howard Stern I could care less about but, this gave me my first extended exposer to the music channels. Every afternoon, for weeks, I would hear a great song off an album I had long forgotten, on the Alt Nation channel, wafting over the cube wall. I was just about sold.
The only problem remaining was reception. My co-worker sat next to a window and was having reception problems despite Sirius having a land based repeater in our market. I’m located closer to the center of the building so using a satellite radio probably wasn’t going to work. So I waited. Sirius offered online streaming but it was only a 32k stream. Not going to work for me.
Finally, Sirius started offering near CD quality streams but, only offered a Windows based player in a browser. I love my tunes but, not enough to switch back to Windows. So the hunt was on to find a way to stream Sirius online to Linux or OSX. If you want to try Sirus for three day for free sign up here.
Play Sirius radio streams on Linux
What I came up with was Sipie. From the Sipie documentation.
“Pronounced SY PIE, like ’sirius python’, sipie is a on line player
for Sirius online Internet streaming. It requires a login to
Sirius’s streaming, and both guest and subscriber logins are
supported. It provides the a back end, a cli and gui.”
Because of changes made to the Sirius stream at some point in the past simply doing an apt-get to install Sipie didn’t work so below I have compiled my own instructions. Even though these instructions are based on Ubuntu 7.10, seeing Sipie is a python script, they should work on other distributions.
First we have to download the dependencies. Open a terminal windows and enter:
sudo apt-get install mplayer python-setuptools python-wxgtk2.6 subversion
We need subversion to download the latest development snapshot because the version of Sipie in the repository doesn’t work.
Change to your home directory:
cd ~
Download the latest development version of Sipie to a directory called sipie under your home directory.
svn co https://sipie.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/sipie sipie
Change to the sipie directory.
cd sipie/
Install Sipie.
sudo easy_install .
Configure and run Sipie.
sipie.py
Once you have lauched Sipie the first time you will need to configure it with your username, password, subscriber status, and location. Just follow the prompts. If you mess up remove the config file in ~/.sipie as outlined below and then just relaunch sipie.py.
username and a crypted password will be stored in /home/mike/.sipie/config
no plain text passwords are stored
if you want to change your password remove /home/mike/.sipie/config
then run sipie and it’ll ask you for username and password again
Enter username: mike
Enter password:
Login Type, type guest or subscriber
Enter login type: subscriber
Are you using Sirius Cananda (http://siriuscanada.ca)
True or False: False
At this point a window should pop up and ask you to enter some characters. Once entered the channel GUI should come up. Simply select a channel and hit play.
Play Sirius radio streams on OSX
For OSX users life is much easier. Simply download install StarPlayr.
From the apple download site:
About StarPlayr
A new breed of Sirius Radio for the Mac. It has album art, an awesome user interface, the ability to record one station and play another. As a recording is finished, the stream is automatically converted from ASF to MP3 and can be played back in iTunes via the StarMP3 playlist. You can take your recordings with you on the road syncing to an iPod/iPhone any other PMP device that supports MP3.
What’s New in this Version
- Easy to use iCal Scripts to automate StarCasts.
- Faster tuning
- Up to date Artist and Song info
- Paws feature using Spacebar or Paws button
- Mute option
- Mega size cache options
- Improved iTunes syncing: Bookmarkable, Skip Shuffle
- Robust StarCasting (fixed time-out bug)
- StarMP3 Trooper, Manual MP3 conversion mode
- Free fully editable Bonus AppleScripts
Although there are other players avaiable for OSX, in my opinion, StarPlayr is the best. My only complaint is that there is no mini player and you can only resize the application to a certain degree. Other then that it works great.
ROCK ON!
chris | Mar 19, 2008 | Reply
I’ve been listening to Sirius everyday online using Konqueror. No special configuration needed.
Mike | Mar 19, 2008 | Reply
Really. Cool. Seeing I’m a Gnome user I would have never of found that. What do you do for channel listings?
That’s all sipie really does. Searches the Sirius site for the links and passes them to mplayer.
vtqn | Mar 19, 2008 | Reply
Sirius will work with Firefox on a Kubuntu system.
Mike | Mar 19, 2008 | Reply
you lucky KDE guys. But thanks for the info and the visit. Now I know.
IceTheNet | Mar 19, 2008 | Reply
[quote] you lucky KDE guys? [/quote]
Unless you have been living in the dark ages KDE can be installed on linux, solaris, BSD, and many other operating systems. From Ubuntu that comes with Gnome Stock the package manager will allow you to install kde and you can even change your whole system to kubuntu by selecting kde as your default GUI. or leave it run as I do as GNOME. Then you can have the best of both worlds just log off and log into KDE. or if you want another option good advice use virtual box and install a kde os you could even install ubuntu with kde and make it full kubuntu and listen to serious:) but still have your main os available.
OK that is just way too much fun
Enjoy
ed | Mar 19, 2008 | Reply
I have no problem playing sirius through Firefox on the Gnome desktop.
admin | Mar 19, 2008 | Reply
ed. The firefox plugin never worked for me.
Ice. I know you can switch window managers at the drop of a hat. I just prefered the cli interface of sipie. Mostly because it allows me to integrate sirius into my MythTV menus giving me whole house audio.
As for KDE vs Gnome I prefer Gnome. No particular reason. I just do. I will admit that file manager in KDE is way better then nautilus.
The rest is just personal preference.
jimbo | Mar 25, 2008 | Reply
I am listening to sipie right now to howard stern on Ubuntu
, also it works in firefox
the program for macosx is a freeware , its like the coolest thing ever , also if u google enough , you can play it in vlc ( done it myself) also in gxine ( did not try this yet)
jimbo | Mar 25, 2008 | Reply
check this out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaiRMInkTvk
Mike | Mar 26, 2008 | Reply
I’m still working on the firefox plugin and ubuntu. Sipie works well enough for me. If you only care about a few stations then all you have to do is copy the stream locations and enter them into totem or xine.
Thanks for the visit and the comment.
ER | May 1, 2008 | Reply
Sirius does indeed play on UbuntuStudio 8.04 running KDE and Firefox 3…it’s somewhat deceptive at first because the player window shows no activity…but if you see “transferring data from xxxxxx.xxxxx akamaistream.net”at the bottom of the player window…after a few seconds you should hear audio. I installed the optional media packs/plugins available in “add remove programs” and I believe that set it up to work.
jeffemmert | May 4, 2008 | Reply
I have it installed and almost working in Firefox 2 in a Kubuntu 8.04 (KDE 3.5) environment. I’m logged in and my station is displayed, but no sound is coming out. Amarok media player works fine and I am able to login to Sirius using Konqueror and get it playing that way. How do I get the Sirius Player toolbar working in Firefox? It may need some additional plugin. Sadly MediaPlayer is unavaible to me in Linux.
Mike | Jun 16, 2008 | Reply
I looked into this a while ago and here’s my experience…
1…I never got sipie to work. Ever. Tried for hours. Even got to the point where I typed in my username and password and then BAM it crashed.
2…I just use the sirius firefox plugin. You can search for it on the firefox add-ons website. It always works but it appears it hasn’t been updated in a while. Only downfall from what I can tell is that it doesn’t show “Now Playing” info. But this is my favorite (and easiest) recommendation.
3…download the MediaPlayerConnectivity firefox plugin from the plugins site. What this does is allow you to launch embedded video/audio from a website into an external application. When you log into sirius without it, the sirius player will come up but will not play because it starts looking for a suitable plugin (to play asf, I think. Can’t remember. It’s some stupid windows online streaming codec. Anyway, firefox won’t find a suitable plugin). If you install MediaPlayerConnectivity and come back to the sirius player, when it looks for a suitble plugin you can just cancel that. Look at the sirius player and the MediaPlayerConnectivity plugin will be there. Then you can click on it and it will launch the stream from whatever external player you have set up (mplayer, xine, etc). You may have to mess around with what players work for you. If I remember correctly, it didn’t work for me in mplayer but it did work in xine.
Jon Pastore | Aug 17, 2008 | Reply
After gettign window for captcha characters, I get a text prompt for “Enter a Stream”
what do you put in there?
John Mehorter | Sep 6, 2008 | Reply
put in the name of the channel you want. eg. classicvinyl
Paul | Dec 13, 2008 | Reply
I still get no sound with sipie or any other way I try to play sirius with linux.
Santana | Dec 16, 2008 | Reply
try this!!!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3546
carm | Jan 14, 2009 | Reply
I am looking for a fix for the pause in sirius internet music that occurs when it senses no activity at your computer after an hour or so. I pump sirius internet throughout speakers in my home and don’t like having to run to the host computer to hit: “Click here….” to relaunch the music. Does anyone have a fix for this? There was a fix for AOL when they had a similar setup. Thanks Carm
pointdexter | Aug 4, 2009 | Reply
can you please help me on where to find this program Konqueror to listen to howard on the internet thanks in advance
sandrar | Sep 10, 2009 | Reply
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.
sipie wont work | May 18, 2010 | Reply
i get this error when trying to run:
sipie.py
File “/usr/lib/python2.6/HTMLParser.py”, line 115, in error
raise HTMLParseError(message, self.getpos())
HTMLParser.HTMLParseError: malformed start tag, at line 100, column 3
any ideas?
Botunda | Aug 15, 2010 | Reply
Yeah, I get the same thing:
self.error(“malformed start tag”)
File “/usr/lib/python2.6/HTMLParser.py”, line 115, in error
raise HTMLParseError(message, self.getpos())
HTMLParser.HTMLParseError: malformed start tag, at line 100, column 3
Anyone with some options here?! I hate dead threads
Kasuko | Feb 7, 2011 | Reply
Sipie is now dead, I have made a rewrite available at http://www.ionshard.com/pyxis
I have removed Windows support and any GUIs other than CLI. The bonus is that it is much more stable.
Check it out.
Alicia Reynolds | Jul 24, 2011 | Reply
Heya – neat feed.
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