[pheffner]

Can any of you share a direct streaming URL for the Villages radio station WVLG?
Those of us with internet stream capable sound systems (Sonos, Bose Soundtouch, Roku Soundbridge) could have whole house WVLG if we could tease out a direct streaming URL. Many times you can dig deep enough into the web side code of a streaming player and find it but whoever put together the VLG site has it buried under layers of .json files and somesuch. A nice direct .mp3 or .flac stream URL would be great for our purposes.

I sent them (WVLG) a message on their web form asking about this and received no reply.

[charlieo1126@gmail.com]

Oh My God a whole house no matter where you go playing same old music , well I guess one mans heaven is another mans hell lol

[retiredguy123]

Originally Posted by pheffner

Can any of you share a direct streaming URL for the Villages radio station WVLG?
Those of us with internet stream capable sound systems (Sonos, Bose Soundtouch, Roku Soundbridge) could have whole house WVLG if we could tease out a direct streaming URL. Many times you can dig deep enough into the web side code of a streaming player and find it but whoever put together the VLG site has it buried under layers of .json files and somesuch. A nice direct .mp3 or .flac stream URL would be great for our purposes.

I sent them (WVLG) a message on their web form asking about this and received no reply.

I'm not sure I understand your question. Can't you just connect a tablet or computer to your speaker system and use The Villages app or the WVLG website to play the station? The station is also available on Xfinity Channel 99.

[John_W]

The Villages WVLG FM 102.7 If you have an Ad Blocker, you'll need to disable it. Also you may need to click on the box in the lower left corner for the sound to start.

[TommyT]

WO Streaming Player

[pheffner]

Allright, I'll elaborate further. Many radio stations (especially the ones owned by large media concerns like iheartradio) offer their streams through aggregator firms like TuneIn which offer a directory of many stations from which to choose to suit your taste. Most also will only offer the streams through phone or PC browser "players" which are more like ad content display systems with incidental audio player. This way the station's owners can get ad revenue from both in-audio and "push" ads to your browser. The independent stations can offer a direct URL which will work with streaming players which usually don't feature a display. Search Amazon for 'internet radio player' and you'll see beau-coup units which can play internet streams. These units are nice 'cause they don't require you to keep a PC/Phone running to play a stream and offer great sound (Search crutchfield.com with 'internet radio tuner' to see the higher end offerings)

I have another issue with the push ads, they can (and often do) offer a vector for malware propagation through infected graphics and javascript code. I had to do a reload on one of my systems after getting infected this way.

Obviously, not receiving push ads (many of which feature embedded videos) will save some internet bandwidth but I'd consider this a minor win.

To see what I'm referring to regarding direct URLs, go over to internet-radio.com and find a station which looks like something you'd like to hear and first press the play button to hear the stream. Then click on the tiny 'pls' button below the play button and it should send a text file to your Downloads directory. Change the .pls extension to .txt and open the file in an editor. The link after "File1=" would be a direct streaming URL. If you copy that and paste it in the link bar of your browser you should get a page with the browser's embedded play which is playing the stream (with no scaffolding ads).

You should be able to paste it into one of your PC's players and hear the stream:

• Winamp: File->Play URL... and paste URL in popup box
• VLC Media Player: Media-> Open Network Stream and Paste URL in box
• iTunes: File -> Open Stream and Paste URL in box

The internet stream player systems work pretty much the same way; give them a stream URL and it will play it and optionally allow you to save to favorites/presets.

I don't know where this leaves me for WVLG, it looks like they don't want to lose the AD revenue and I want to use my Bose Soundtouch systems so I guess I have an impasse.