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HOWTO:Listening to SomaFM on my Media PC

Lately I have become addicted to SomaFM. Previously I used Orb (http://www.orb.com/) to stream music from my home library but when I had the home gigabit network disassembled during our latest system overhaul I lost that capability.

Whats a guy to do at the office with no music? Turn to streaming music of course. This is how I happened upon SomaFM. Of course, everyone knows SomaFM but not as many people listen to it. Tuning in I instantly became a fan, specifically of the Secret Agent channel. Its just fabulous music for tuning out while you write some software or otherwise need to disengage the brain to really focus on something.

Of course, this leads to the quest to bring SomaFM: Secret Agent into my home and my MediaPC is just the conduit for that since it, amazingly enough, can be used in every room in my house!

Unfortunately, Microsoft only lets you connect ‘easily’ to their preferred providers or others that have written software for Media Center to connect to their playlists. I poked around a bit and found enough tidbits to get the recipe that would deliver these groovy and ‘chill’ “beats” to my home environment. This is probably obvious to most but I had to search and never found a definitive answer on Google so here is my contribution to the meme.

1) Open the .pls from the provider (.pls is a Playlist file)
2) Get the URL from the playlist, its obvious.
3) Open media player on your media pc
4) File->Open URL, paste the URL from step 2 into the box.
5) Once its streaming and the title info has appeared: File->Add To Library->Currently Playing Playlist
6) Save the file with a nice name, its what will show up in you list.
7) Voila! Now launch Media Center, go to My Music->Playlists and enjoy the streaming goodness.

Yea, obvious but now if someone else searches for this info they’ll get a recipe and isn’t that what the internet is all about?

Enjoy-