Superseded by version 2.2.
Welcome, visitors from Dashboard Widgets! And from Apple.com, as of 12th June. Please don’t be too scared.
I suppose I should make a post about my widget here. It’s, uh, really cool. It plays radio streams from the BBC, and looks pretty smart to boot. And yes, of course I’m biased.
Any suggestions or support queries – please check out the helpful comments to this thread. I’ll try to get them organised into an FAQ. You can also send them to me via email if you like. 
I’ll be submitting it to Apple soon… but their submission guidelines say I need a “specific supporting website” – so I actually have to think of some stuff to put on a page 
Oh yeah, if you didn’t come here from the widget and don’t fancy wading through the archives over at Dashboard Widgets, you can get it right here.
Update: I uploaded the widget to Apple, and it’s there right now. Quadrupled my blog traffic overnight!
Your widget is great. I didn’t realise how much I liked to listen to radio while I work.
But I have one request.
Is it possible to add BBC Radio Scotland to your list of stations?
I’m a big fan of Mr Anderson’s fine tunes.
I am in Shanghai and it is not working here. Any way to fix it?
Great widget, where is Ulster by the way?
Why not put BBC London radio on there too?
Northern Ireland! The next release has complete local radio listings (and it took a bloody long time) – 1.7 will go live once I’ve added in an auto-updater.
Harkman, great little widget – thanks for local radio including Ulster – any chance of adding Radio Foyle. Thanks for your hard work
First off – great widget. Couple of things though.
1) the people who say it just complains all of the time about no internet connection – I had that and finally realised that it was due to proxies being configured incorrectly. Once I loaded the network settings in system prferences and sorted out the settings it worked fine. I’d not noticed that it was broken as I use firefox most of the time and this has it’s own settings.
2) listening to radio5 this afternoon and noticed it seems much lower quality than the bbc widget or if I use the bbc player. I assume this is due to it connecting to a lower quality feed? Is it possible to point it at the higher bandwidth stream (don’t know if this is true of the other stations – I only tried fivelive
)
cheers
Darren,
1) Good catch, I assume Dashboard uses the system proxies.
2) It uses the same stream, sure it’s not in your head?
How do you get the real player browser plug in.?
Just dropped in to say thanks and noticed the new download.
Two or three clicks and it was up and running.
It’s nice to see that local UK radio plays bad music too.
To keep an idea of what is on, I bookmarked the skedule – . Need to remember the times are UK and not GMT (as is the case in shortwave).
Thanks for the listening tips. I am sure my favorite classics on BBC7 are not among those you were speaking of.
Thanks again!
Cheers!
1) Good catch, I assume Dashboard uses the system proxies.
Appears so. Works fine since I sorted that.
2) It uses the same stream, sure it’s not in your head?
Nope. It did sound worse. But I’ve played a bit more and it seems to be the feed. It’s almost as if it downgrades if the server is too busy. Anyway, not a problem with your widget – I get the same effect with the bbc one at times.
Cheers. Great little widget!
Rob – from Real.com
Lee – cheers. Might be sensible to add a link to the schedule from the back of the widget I guess
Darren – yeah, the live streams can be highly suspicious at times… and of course, the more popular the show is, the worse the audio quality!
Fantastic to hear some local news from the UK while I am living down here in New Zealand. Blows my mind to hear local traffic reports on areas I once lived in 15 years ago.
This is one of the Perfect widgets that everyone has to have – thankyou… Sadly, I can’t seem to get it to work on my machine – if anyone has any suggestions? Here’s my situation summarised handily in checklist form:
1. Speakers are on
2. Internet connection is active
3. Standard 10.4.3 OS X firewall is on
4. Listening via bbc.co.uk works fine
5. Latest version of widget + Realplayer
6. Launching the widget shows the play button briefly, before it turns into a pause button and is highlighted blue – this would suggest that it’s playing a stream
7. Changing stations and re-launching widget has no effect
8. + and – volume buttons don’t respond when pressed; the mute button does, however
I have been looking for the widget all my life – so near yet so far…
Ah. Literally a minute after I posted my comment, I get a dialog from the widget saying the connection was lost and prompts me to click OK. Doing so causes it to quit unexpectedly, with OS X bringing up a dialog asking would I like to relaunch the widget or send a report to Apple. On relaunching the widget (each and every time), the play button appears greyed out, whereas the mute button is responsive and the + – volume controls *look* responsive but aren’t (ie they’re the same shade of grey as the mute button, but if you click on them, they don’t press down).
If you think that’d be of any help, I can send you a copy of the report… Arsebiscuits.
It’s a great widget, thanks. A couple of suggestion:
1) Make the logos link to the relevant web page.
2) Consider removing the volume controls, which are redundant given that OSX has a great menubar volume controller.
3) Make it a bit bigger, or at least the play/pause button.
4) Most importantly…make “play” the default when the widget loads, so the BBC loads on startup – or, is there some way I can set this up myself?
Thanks! Josef
One more thing…I find that the Realplayer streams are dropped a lot…so I have to constantly (once per hour, or so) hit “play” on the widget to reload it. Do others have this problem? Is it widget-related? Real-related? Or just a busy internet?
Great job! One small request – Radio 4 LW? (For the cricket fans…)
I have your widget working on my laptop and iMac, but I can’t get it to load Real Player on my Mac Mini.
Also for the Cricket fans, the BBC don’t have the online rights to broadcast the cricket I think. If they do, it’s usually on BBC Sports Extra
Josef – (1) Thought about it, decided that the number of accidental clicks would be too annoyingly high. (2) The volume controls are actually linked to Real Player plugin’s volume; useful for adjusting volume relative to other apps, or turning up the volume if you accidentally turned it down in Safari or something. (3) Maaaaybe, but it’s really supposed to be a minimal widget. (4) Not a bad idea.
Aidan – Gordon’s right on both counts about the cricket; I’m a fan myself, so BBC4LW would have been on there if it were necessary!
Gordon – My best suggestion is to reinstall Real Player. Apparently some OS upgrades can mess with Safari plugins.
Hi Hawkman. OK, of my four suggestions the last one is certainly the most desired (make the widget play on startup). I guess I can’t set that up using Automator, as I can’t “see” Dashboard or any of the widgets in Automator… Would be really useful, as in:
1) Set computer to turn on at 6am.
2) Be woken up by BBC automatically… (I’m in Canada)
Is the source of the widget available to be tinkered with, and relatively easy to do for a novice tinkerer? Failing that, could you set it as an option?
Thanks! Josef
It’s dead easy Josef. Widgets are actually just special packages – control-click and choose “show package contents” to reveal its composite files.
Open up the “BBC Radio.js” file in a text editor like SubEthaEdit. Do a find & replace, changing autostart=”false” to autostart=”true” – there are 4, although the two on line 932 are the only ones you should actually need to change. Save, and restart the widget. That should work.
Thanks Hawkman, I’ll try that!
Right. So I see there’s no chance of you helping *me* out then, after how many weeks.
If I had an answer, Preacherman, I’d have given it to you. Sorry, but I don’t know what’s wrong.
One of the things that may, or may not have helped me was launching realplayer 10 and choosing ‘check for updates’ in the realplayer (top left) menu. There were 3 or 4 security updates which I installed and it worked after that. Prior to that I was getting a cannot connect message.
Thanks very much for making this.
The addition of regional stations really makes this my most used widget ever, it’s great.
Could you perhaps add ‘BBC Radio4 LongWave’ in the next version, so I can use your widget to listen to the Cricket?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/realplayer/media/lwg2.ram
Thanks
Can someone please help me! Ive tried both this widget and the BBC website and all to no avail – from the Beeb (via Safari) i get the following message:
The page “BBC Radio Player†has content of MIME type “application/x-mplayer2″. Because you dont have a plug-in installed for this MIME type, this content cant be displayed.
Where i would expect the controls in the widget and the bbc player, instead i get these light blue lego icons with question marks on them.
I have the latest OSX, Safari (i got a intel imac last week) and downloaded the latest player which i have reset and unistalled and reinstalled – but all the same.
Where do i get this missing plugin from / how do i install it??!
Apologies but this is drving me mad!
PS
I can listen to the beeb radio if i select the standalone mode (whcih places a ram file on my desktop) but not directly via the bbc radio player controls or the widget.
All help appreciated
Hi Hawkman. I modified the widget as you suggested (allowing it to autostart) and that works fine. Actually, the widget is SUPERB, I love it. But…when I set Dashboard to start at startup I get a message from the widget that there’s no internet connection. I think this is because Dashboard starts too soon, before the internet connection is set up. I’ve tried Dashboard Startup and Dashboard Kickstart, but they suffer from a different problem (they start and quit the Dashboard too quickly for the widget to connect to the internet, so the widget is just left waiting and only connects to the BBC if I manually start the Dashboard). So, it seems that I need to find a workaround to start the Dashboard on startup, keep it open long enough (60 seconds or so) to connect to the BBC, then disappear. Any ideas? Thanks, Josef
Great Widget. Works a treat on my G3IMac. But won’t run on my new Intel IMac, running OS X 10.4.5. Real Player 10.0.0 is loaded. No controls visible… just pair of blue icons. What am I doing wrong ? Internet is fine, same widget works fine on G3.
Real Player is not yet a universal binary, and Real don’t exactly seem to be making speedy progress.
So is the fault with Real Player ?
Any work round ?
Unfortunately not. Until Real Player is a universal binary, the plugin (needed for audio) can’t be run within an Intel-native application (such as Dashboard).
If you’re having trouble installing this widget on a case-sensitive filesystem use Terminal to cd into the widget directory and issue the command:
mv default.png Default.png
After which it should install fine.
dan, on July 21, 2005 at 10:38 pm, said:
i have exact same problem as STEVE ^
i am getting very frustrated i have no idea what to do…
if anybody has any solutions it would be much appreciated, thanks!
JC – You’re just missing RealPlayer plugin – get the download from Real.com. And if you have lego bricks showing – you don’t have the latest version of the widget (which, incidentally, ought to show you a message about this anyway).
Andy
After several months of using this excellent widget, I am having a problem with BBC 7. Everything *looks* fine, but no sound comes out (and it’s not the volume control’s fault). As far as I can see *all*
the other channels work fine. I thought it might be a problem with the url that the widget is contacting, but
if I look at the plist file, with
defaults read widget-com.phantomgorilla.widget.bbcradio
I see the following:
{
ID = 18112;
Volume = 57;
band = “”;
lastupdatecheck = 1175194330730;
latestversion = “2.2″;
logo = “images/bbc7.gif”;
selection = 9;
url = “http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/realplayer/dsatg2.rpm”;
}
and that seems to be the correct url, because if I open it in real player (directly, or via Safari) it works.
I have realplayer Version 10.1.0 (412).
Any help or advice greatly appreciated.
I love this widget, but I’m struggling to get it to work properly. I solved one problem – no sound despite having RealPlayer 10 installed and, yes, the volume is working on the computer. For those of you who have “no sound” issues and are using a newer iMac, I found the following obscure note on the RealPlayer help site:
“Note: For users of Macintosh computers purchased after September 2004 (such as iMac G5s, Mac minis, and PowerBook laptops), a problem in Mac OS X on some recent Macintosh computer hardware can cause loss of sound in RealPlayer and certain other applications. Launching Apple’s GarageBand software once will resolve the problem.”
The second issue is that the feed is dropped after almost exactly one minute of playing, and I have to press the play button again. This is getting annoying very quickly. Is this a RealPlayer issue? Any help would be appreciated!
Thank you bunches! I absolutely couldn’t find a solution for the loss of sound upon moving to RealPlayer 10.1.0, and, honestly, on reading that I thought, “yeah, sure.” But, in fact, it fixed the problem, exactly as advertised. I launched Garageband. Played an old project (don’t know if that’s necessary). Quit Garageband. And now RealPlayer 10.1.0 works fine.
I’ve now found the advice in other places, but not on real.com–not even knowing to google for ["loss of sound" garageband]. So, again, thanks!
I’m having some issues with the widget, unfortunately. When I try to start playback, I get the spinning gears for about half a second and then nothing. Play button returns to stopped state, but hitting it just repeats the process…
When I hit the button a file briefly appears in the Preferences folder with the name cf#XXXXX where XXXXX is a random set of alphanumeric characters. At the same time in the Console i get the following reports:
(event handler):Undefined value
2007-07-27 11:37:00.274 DashboardClient[409] (com.phantomgorilla.widget.bbcradio) file:///Users/username/Library/Widgets/BBC%20Radio.wdgt/schedule.js: Undefined value (line: 30)
(event handler):Undefined value
(event handler):Undefined value
2007-07-27 11:37:00.315 DashboardClient[418] (com.phantomgorilla.widget.bbcradio) file:///Users/username/Library/Widgets/BBC%20Radio.wdgt/schedule.js: Undefined value (line: 30)
(event handler):Undefined value
(event handler):Undefined value
2007-07-27 11:37:00.904 DashboardClient[419] (com.phantomgorilla.widget.bbcradio) file:///Users/username/Library/Widgets/BBC%20Radio.wdgt/schedule.js: Undefined value (line: 30)
(event handler):Undefined value
I have checked that Real media plays correctly in Safari. I have Real 10. Safari 2.0.4 and Mac OS X 10.4.10. Running on a 1.6GHz G5 with 2GB RAM.
As it is a company-based system, I don’t have Garageband, but as RealPlayer and the web-based player work OK, I don’t think this would help.
Any help anyone can offer to enable me to resume use of this excellent widget would be greatly appreciated.
Just installed this widget (along with RealPlayer) and it took me forever to figure out why no sound: I had my firewall on. To fix:
1. In RealPlayer, Preferences -> Transport, click on the Use specific UDP Ports. I used the default (7070 and 7071)
2. In System Preferences -> Sharing -> Firewall, click on “New…” and for Port Name, select “Other”, leave TCP port number(s) blank, and in UDP Port number(s) enter “7070, 7071″.
Love the widget. Used it every day… until today, now it doesn’t work. Spinning grey circle but no connection. Real Player works when connected to the BBC website. Please help, would love to get it working again…
Thanks lots,
Jamie
Argh. Sorry for wasting your time. Re-downloaded Real and restarted. Sorry – and thank you!
Love the widget, too. Since upgrading to Leopard, I’ve had some issues, like the widget playing only when dashboard is on the screen (once I hit f12 to hide the dashboard, the stream plays for a few seconds and then quits, until I bring dashboard back up. Then everything works fine, again). Thanks, again!
Dave
Hi, also love the widget, I have been using it on Tiger fine. But like Dave, since upgrading to Leopard I can’t seem to get it to work unless the dashboard is open.
Do you have any advice?
Huh? Strange, I get it to play, but as soon as I move from Dashboard to Desktop, the audio stops… I go back to Dashboard, and the sound continues… any ideas?
Works great for about a minute than stops. G5 Dual 2.0 10.4.11 Love to hear the BBC in Texas!
seems not to work in Leopard, the stream stops as soon as you leave dashboard
yes i have the same problem. Whenever you come off dashboard the audio stops and when you go back on to dashboard it starts again. any ideas on how to fix this because it means i cant use my computer while the radio is on. i am running os 10.5.2.
thank you
I concur with all the recent comments, made by others who have upgraded their Mac OS to Leopard, about the apparent unreliability of the stream. I, too, have noticed the the audio stream is far more fragile. It often stops if my browser is accessing the internet, or if switching to or from Dashboard. It’s far less rock solid as it was when Tiger was the OS.