iHeart over the last few years was in a rush to buy up stations and monitize the heck out of their streams, encoding those streams and packaging them in "iHR containers"....basically video streams...so they could have exclusive access to those streams. They were effectively also doing something else. They were sticking a finger in the eye of Internet Wi-Fi radio manufacturers and owners by not allowing Reciva or Frontier Silicon and other stream aggregators to have license to decode those streams. I firmly believe that Logitech saw this coming and dumped the Logitech Touch and other Squeezebox radios, and stopped updating the popular media server software. iHeart and their "partners-in-crime," Tune-In, either refuse to allow their proprietary decoding software to be used in these radios, or they refuse to negotiate with aggregators, especially off-shore ones like Reciva and Frontier Silicon for the sake of we radio owners.
Now, iHeart is fianancially sick. So if and when they file Chapter 7, 11, or 13, what will over 800 stations do? Some of my favorite stations have gone the way of iHeart...WOR-710 radio in NYC, the WLW "blowtorch" in Ohio, KFYI in Phoenix, and KOGO in San Diego. I have spent virtually hours attempting to determine URLs with both URL Snooper and Wireshark on Windows and Linux, respectively with poor results. iHeart has Cloudflare blocking queries and connections to their TLD octets, resulting in no connection. The stream for WOR 710 out of NYC looks like this:
But enter this URL into your Station list at Reciva or Frontier Silicon and your radio will not decode it, as it has intentionally been made a video stream in order to force you to listen to the station on PC, Mac, phone rather than the radio for which you paid good cash. (And in some cases, has superior audio fidelity to your PC speakers). Stereophile Magazine gave the Logitech Touch with it's great D/A converter a glowing review a few years back, and then iHeart ruined everything by encoding the streams to monitize them.
This is my first post on this forum, and I'm glad I found this forum. I suspect that if there are any software developers here who know C++ or Python, etc., and can create a decoder that could be used to flash something like the Logitech Touch, that would be great. Much of the current development going on with the Touch is open source...and much of it doesn't work. If I wasn't so involved with hardware, I'd be better at coding...but that's not my forte'.
Of course, I am not suggesting that anyone do anything that isn't completely legal. But I am just lamenting the fact that there is no reason these iHeart stations, or stations that use the iHeart model, can't release a singular stream for people who moved away from a terrestrial station and may not be comfortable with using a PC to listen. In particular, the transplanted elderly and/or disabled who have visual limitations or are not computer savvy, who rely upon a Wi-Fi radio to listen to the station they grew up listening to...like WOR-710 in NYC....are skunked out of tuning in on an ergonomic radio.
I try to stay within "forum rules of good conduct" and hope that I'm abiding. If I've said anything even remotely objectional, please PM me and I'll edit or delete. I am a supermod at another well-known forum and I realize how important it is to stay within the rules of the forum. Again, thanks for letting me sign up here.
Now, iHeart is fianancially sick. So if and when they file Chapter 7, 11, or 13, what will over 800 stations do? Some of my favorite stations have gone the way of iHeart...WOR-710 radio in NYC, the WLW "blowtorch" in Ohio, KFYI in Phoenix, and KOGO in San Diego. I have spent virtually hours attempting to determine URLs with both URL Snooper and Wireshark on Windows and Linux, respectively with poor results. iHeart has Cloudflare blocking queries and connections to their TLD octets, resulting in no connection. The stream for WOR 710 out of NYC looks like this:
as previously noted in October 2017 within this forum. Somehow, the stream jumps from one IP address to another every minute or two, seemingly with the very intention of preventing anyone from using the stream in a radio.
But enter this URL into your Station list at Reciva or Frontier Silicon and your radio will not decode it, as it has intentionally been made a video stream in order to force you to listen to the station on PC, Mac, phone rather than the radio for which you paid good cash. (And in some cases, has superior audio fidelity to your PC speakers). Stereophile Magazine gave the Logitech Touch with it's great D/A converter a glowing review a few years back, and then iHeart ruined everything by encoding the streams to monitize them.
This is my first post on this forum, and I'm glad I found this forum. I suspect that if there are any software developers here who know C++ or Python, etc., and can create a decoder that could be used to flash something like the Logitech Touch, that would be great. Much of the current development going on with the Touch is open source...and much of it doesn't work. If I wasn't so involved with hardware, I'd be better at coding...but that's not my forte'.
Of course, I am not suggesting that anyone do anything that isn't completely legal. But I am just lamenting the fact that there is no reason these iHeart stations, or stations that use the iHeart model, can't release a singular stream for people who moved away from a terrestrial station and may not be comfortable with using a PC to listen. In particular, the transplanted elderly and/or disabled who have visual limitations or are not computer savvy, who rely upon a Wi-Fi radio to listen to the station they grew up listening to...like WOR-710 in NYC....are skunked out of tuning in on an ergonomic radio.
I try to stay within "forum rules of good conduct" and hope that I'm abiding. If I've said anything even remotely objectional, please PM me and I'll edit or delete. I am a supermod at another well-known forum and I realize how important it is to stay within the rules of the forum. Again, thanks for letting me sign up here.
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