SciTech Watch: Sirius Widget
Published March 09, 2006
I'm a big fan of streaming Internet music, also known as Internet radio. I like the variety and the idea of using a stand-alone music player like Winamp to listen to the streams or channels I like. This past Christmas, I purchased a Sirius satellite receiver for my wife and I to listen to — me for the music and NPR, her for Martha Stewart and NPR. I'm really taken by the Classic Rock channel on Sirius, Channel 16, aka The Vault.
When I found out that you could stream Sirius music channels over the Internet I was really pleased, until I tried it. The player is flash-based and pretty clunky to use. It also appears to time out after extended periods of playing, although I can't say whether this is a bug or a feature.
Enter the Sirius Tuner. The Sirius Satellite Tuner is a widget that runs under Yahoo's Widget Engine. The interface is small player window with controls for volume as well as three banks of ten presets to allow you to preprogram your favorite Sirius channels for easy access. The Sirius Satellite Tuner widget runs on Microsoft Windows only.
Setup is very simple. You will first need to install Yahoo's Widget Engine. The engine is no cost and does not contain any spyware or adware. Once the engine has been installed, there will be a directory of widgets in a My Widgets directory off of your My Documents directory.
After the Widget Engine is installed download the SIRIUS Satellite Tuner and place the resulting SIRIUS_Satellite_Tuner.widget file into the My Widgets directory. Double-click on the SIRIUS_Satellite_Tuner.widget filename and the Sirius Satellite Tuner will start.
If the setup screen does not appear when the widget starts, right-click on the Sirius widget and choose the Widget Preferences option. 
The Sirius tab is used to enter your Sirius User ID and password for getting access to the Sirius content streams. The What's On tab enables you to set how often the widget fetches the song and artists names from the Sirius servers. The Alerts tab allows you to put in artist names and the widget will alert you when the artist is playing on Sirius and what channel they are on. Optionally, the widget will switch to the Sirius channel the Artist is on. The Alarm Clock tab allows you to set an alarm at any hour and minute combination. The Hotkeys tab allows you to pick a key combination to bring the widget to the top over any interveneing screens. The IM Status window will allow you to get Artist alerts via AOL, MSN, or Yahoo instant messenger services. The Window tab allows you to anchor the widget in its current position and set the degree of transparency the widget exhibits.
The Sirius Satellite Tuner was written by Tanner Jepsen and has had over 20,000 downloads to date.
- SciTech Watch: Sirius Widget
- Published: March 09, 2006
- Type: Review
- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Sci/Tech: Internet, Sci/Tech: Computers, Music: News, Culture: Media, Sci/Tech: Software
- Part of a feature: SciTech Watch
- Writer: John Vaccaro
- John Vaccaro's BC Writer page
- John Vaccaro's personal site
- Spread the Word
- Like this article?
- Email this
Save to del.icio.us
Comments on this articleComments
Clunky? :) that's a polite way to put it.. I'll defenitly continue to use winamp and stream my music directly from internet streaming sites.. Using a Sirius radio in my car is perfectly fine, but not on my computer. Lots of people in canada have problem receiving satellite music anyways, the coverage isn't that great here in montreal, but it's slowly getting better..
Kiltak
[Geeks Are Sexy] Tech. News
I wonder if there is a Dashboard Widget out there that does this - If not there should be. I agree the sirius.com player is awkward and unreliable.
http://www.vi agratriangle.com
I use the Sirius web player a lot and never had any major problems. I used to use Firefox to listen to music, but it won't show the current song playing, IE does, so I started using IE to listen to music from there. Their player takes up hardly any resources and I've kept it on for days at a time (literally) and never had any problems with it timing out.. that's odd that you have so many issues with the web interface..
by the way, there's no flash involved either. it's using DHTML and WMP plus an activex control to display the current song.
There is something else now called the Sirius Internet Radio Player. It is available for IE, Firefox, Windows Messenger, and Media Player. The IE/Firefox ones are more or less a standalone application. It takes a WHILE to log in for some reason on my computer, but after that it streams pretty cleanly. If you subscribe to the higher bandwidth feed it supports that. The Firefox version does not log in automatically, the IE one does. For that reason I use the IE one. I tried the Media Player one also but I thought inside Media Player it was clunky.
Pretty cool. I like it! Thanks for this site. I had the same issue with sirius online flahs player until I got this widget. I'm gonna also try the internet player the guy pointed out before me.
BTW. Do you know that you can record your programs pretty much like Tivo does. You will need some free prog to do that though. I am using simple radio recorder. I don't know the link. you can Google it.
cheers :)
Add your comment, speak your mind
(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/44733)
What's even better is the fact that XM radio is available for free to subscribers of AOL, online and with very little jitter