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Support and FAQ

• I tried to listen to the Pop-up Player and nothing happened.

• The Pop-up Player opens a new tab in my browser rather than opening a new window. Why?

• Will your audio stream work in my media player of choice?

• While I was listening, the stream stopped and never restarted. What happened?

• Why is the stream louder when I play it in ______ than when I play it in _____?

• How do I listen to the stream on my mobile phone?

• Why doesn't your playlist on the website update automatically when there's a new song?

• When I clicked on the "Launch the Stream" link a text file downloaded and opened on my computer. What happened?

• Back to Top ↑I tried to listen to the Pop-up Player and nothing happened.

  The “Pop-up Player” link uses javascript to open a new browser window that contains our custom audio player that works in your browser. A lot of visitors travel the web with pop-up windows disabled. We’ve built in a backup that should be triggered if you have pop-up windows disabled or do not have javascript enabled.

  However, if you click the link and a new window doesn’t open with the player, that means the fallback has failed as well. You’ll need to disable your pop-up blocker for chirpradio.org, or you can try clicking this link to open the player in a new window. If you’d like to disable your pop-up-blocker, consult your browser’s help documents, as it changes from browser to browser.

• Back to Top ↑The Pop-up Player opens a new tab in my browser rather than opening a new window. Why?

  We’ve built the Pop-up Player to open in a new window via javascript, but pop-up blockers block this from triggering. We’ve built a failsafe into the link that will open the player in cases that users have javascript disabled or pop-up windows blocked. However, this failsafe triggers your browser’s default action for opening content in new windows. Browsers like Safari and Chrome by default open new windows from links in a new tab rather than a new window.

  If you’d like to override this action, the easiest way is to enable pop-up windows for the domain chirpradio.org. Consult your browser’s help documents for how to do this, as it changes from browser to browser.

• Back to Top ↑Will your audio stream work in my media player of choice?

  As time goes on, we find that there are more and more players released to computer users. We’ve tested our stream in Windows Media Player, iTunes, WinAmp, FooBar, Quicktime, and VLC on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. We also confirmed that the stream works nicely with FStream on the iPhone and both A Online Radio and StreamFurious for Android-based phones. However, if you encounter a problem, please send us a comment that includes the media player you are trying to use, the operating system you are using, and anything else you can tell us about what you were doing to replicate the problem. We’ll get right to work making sure our stream is compatible for you as well.

  In the meantime, you can always check out our Pop-up Player.

• Back to Top ↑While I was listening, the stream stopped and never restarted. What happened?

  The audio stream needs a constant connection to the internet. Additionally, that internet connection needs to be fast enough to handle the full amount of data we’re sending per second. Occasionally the connection to the stream may drop for any number of reasons. Most media applications that handle streaming audio are able to try to reconnect if a connection has been dropped, but, if while reconnecting it can’t make a new connection, some apps will retry while others will stop, assuming the connection has died.

  In these cases, simply hit the play button again and you should be fine.

• Back to Top ↑Why is the stream louder when I play it in ______ than when I play it in _____?

  Every application has its own volume control. The first thing you’d want to check is whether the volume on one application is set lower than the volume on another. But at a deeper level, each application is built differently and processes the audio in different ways, which accounts for these differences in volume.

  In my [Mike Gibson] limited testing, all things equal, I found that FooBar played the audio at the loudest volume, iTunes and WinAmp comparably at the next loudest volume, and Windows Media player at the lowest volume. Listening to the stream directly via Quicktime Player was actually louder than FooBar, but on occasion distorted the audio, and the Pop-Up Player was occasionally louder than iTunes and occasionally quieter (for which I do not have an answer at the moment).

  That being said, with a couple adjustments to the audio settings in each application I was able to get the same volume in all apps quite easily, and then use my computer/stereo’s volume to control the final volume.

• Back to Top ↑How do I listen to the stream on my mobile phone?

  If you’d like to listen to CHIRP Radio on your mobile, you can check out our mobile listening page with instructions on listening to the stream with either an iPhone or Android based phones. As we’re able to, we’ll add instructions for more phone operating systems to that page.

  We have an app in the iTunes app store that you can get here. For Android and Blackberry users, until we are able to develop applications for your platform we recommend the use of free mobile streaming applications on each platform.

• Back to Top ↑Why doesn't your playlist on the website update automatically when there's a new song?

  Our playlists are updated by our DJs in real time as they do their show. While they all try to submit the new song as soon as it starts playing, they’ve got their hands full during their shift queuing up the next song, answering listener IMs, ensuring the volume is alright and more. Occasionally they’ll submit track information a bit into the song. While we could automate a solution that would use our digital music library and push out the song information from the database as each song is played, that would not be able to account for all the vinyl we bring in, that new record just handed to us from the local band having a record release show next week or any number of instances when we don’t have pre-populated digital information to work with. The digital age is great, but great radio is driven by the human hand. We hope that we’ve found a happy middle ground that gets the song information on the site as soon as possible, but allows our DJs to be as free as possible to put together a great show for our listeners.

• Back to Top ↑When I clicked on the "Launch the Stream" link a text file downloaded and opened on my computer. What happened?

  That file is the playlist file that your media player uses to connect to the stream. We’ve done our best to ensure that you’ll never see the playlist file itself, but we can’t account for every computer configuration out there, and it’s possible that your media player won’t be configured to play these playlist files by default. Don’t fret, as the solution is quite simple.

  Close the text file on your screen, and then open the downloaded file (chirpradio.m3u) in the media player of your choice (iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, FooBar, VLC, etc.).