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.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
What's even better is the fact that XM radio is available for free to subscribers of AOL, online and with very little jitter
2 - [Geeks Are Sexy] Tech. News
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
3 - stu
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
4 - Adam Plocher
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.
5 - Jason
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.
6 - Josh Elmers
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 :)
7 - Patrick Dennison
I love this Sirius Player by Tanner J.
Reading some of the comments, I think some people misunderstood WHAT is being reviewed in this article. The article is reviewing a Yahoo Widget Sirius Player. This is NOT a Sirius product and IS FAR SUPERIOR to the player Sirius provides for use online. I LOVE this Widget. It's like having a Stiletto Sirius Player (which I can't afford) on my computer. This thing plays BETTER that the cheap Sirius radio I have in my car!
One thing I am trying to find an answer to is when I click widget preferences for the Sirius WIDGET, I do not see the same options as depicted in the image in the above article. All I see listed in my preferences windows is 'Sirius' (the screen to enter username/password/location, Colors and Window.
Does anyone know how to access the options shown in this article or have those features been disabled in newer versions? Are there more than one version of the Sirius Satellite Widget by Tanner J?
I've combined the Yahoo Widget with an audio stream capture program called Free Hi-Q Recorder. It uses the audio card to capture any stream/audio source and now I can capture any Sirius stream of 'unlimited length' and download it to an mp3 player for uninterrupted listening in my vehicles that don't have Sirius.
I'm in audio media heaven. Death to terrestrial radio. Mwahahahahahaha!
8 - Ree Griffith
In one of the screen shots, it shows a preferences window that offers "alarm clock". I don't have this option in my Sirius widget...how do I get it?