Making Live365 Work

Over at the blog One Man Safari, the proprietor posts an eclectic assortent of images, including lp cover art from old lps. One of them was linked to a site that in turn has a link to a streaming music site Space Age Pop that I wanted very much to hear. This site uses Live365.com and its software. When I hit the play button a window opened. Pause to explain that this post is all about browser compatability with Live365 stations (as each web site is called). I migrated from IE to Firefox to Opera. I use Opera except to edit my blog, where I have to use Firefox becaues the formatting and editing features in Blogger don't all work in Opera.

So I hit the play button, a little window virtual control panel opens with a play button. I press it and I get some message about a file called play.pls. Huh? What application would I use to open it? Never even heard of .pls files. Tried saving it to disk and playing it. No dice. Opened Firefox. Same routine.

Opened IE. It played perfectly. But I don't want to go back to IE, for security reasons. This is getting ridiculous, say I. Am I going to have to use three browsers now?

So I do a little research on Google and a UK music site recommends making your browser open play.pls with RealPlayer.

When you hit play in the Live365 window and your browser asks what you want to do with play.pls, select Open, then choose RealPlay.exe from your Program Files folder on your hard drive and tell the browser to automatically perform this action from now on.

Eureka! It works in Firefox and Opera.

One last digression. IE is still the snappiest, best functioning browser overall.