When I first installed Windows 7 I found a nice little BBC Radio Player gadget, and I’ve been using it to listen to the BBC while I’m working ever since. However, the BBC recently renamed BBC 7 as Radio 4 Extra and eventually stopped the old url, so the gadget can’t find it any more.
This spurred me to write a radio player myself. It’s not a desktop gadget, MS seem to have stopped supporting them, but a .NET 3.5 application. It displays an icon in the system tray, and a small tool window (which can be closed with the radio playing) that allows selection of the station.
It’s better than the gadget because 1) any non-DRM stream can be played in it (eg all the BBC and any Shoutcast or Icecast stations), 2) it has a volume control and 3) it works on XP. You could even start 2 instances of it and have 2 stations playing at once, but that would be silly.
I’ve been using it for a few days, and it seems to be working OK, so I thought I would release it as a freebie. I’ve set up a few stations by default as examples (only the user who installs it gets these), but the list can be changed by right clicking on the system tray icon and selecting Configure.
The setup program can be downloaded from the Babbacombe site.