Silly me, I forgot one step. here's the correction.
Now I have AlienBBC working on my Mac, I can give instructions. It's much easier than before as one can just download some binaries, and Fink is not needed.
I have been using the latest beta (actually I used 0.96, which I was sent a pre-release of when I was having difficulties, but the instructions should work with 0.94 if that's the latest on the site). Slimserver 6.0. Mac OS 10.3.8, though this shouldn't matter.
If I remember rightly, the old version 0.12 on the main download page stopped working when the BBC changed the layout of their site.
The betas do not work on SlimServer 5.4.0. I think they are supposed to work on 5.4.1, but I have not tried. Some necessary modules are included in SlimServer 6.0 but not in 5.4.0. I don't know if they are in 5.4.1.
I am not sure if the Developer Tools and X11are still needed (I would guess that the Developer Tools are needed but X11 is not). Anyway, the Developer Tools are on the Mac OS installation CDs, as is X11 is you are using Panther. Easy to install, and no harm in having them. In fact I would recommend having the Developer Tools, as they are needed for some other applications.
1. Download mplayer. It can be got from http://prdownloads.sf.net/mplayerosx/ffmpegXbinaries1115.zip Alternatively, get the version with a graphical interface from http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/ . If you do this, use control-click to Show Package Contents and mplayer itself is two levels down.
Put mplayer somewhere convenient, such as /usr/local/bin. (This folder is normally invisible, but it can be reached using Go to Folder from the Finder's Go menu.)
2. One needs an audio codec called cook.bundle. This can be obtained from
http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/codecs.html and download the codec package RealPlayer 9 Mac OS X. This decompresses to an installer package, which installs lots of files, including cook.bundle, into /usr/local/lib/codecs.
Create a folder /Library/Application Support/ffmpegX/reallib and copy
cook.bundle into this folder (again, you can open the invisible folder /usr/local/lib using the Finder's Go to Folder menu item).
3. You should probably debug the installation at this stage, especially of you have obtained the codec or mplayer from other places. Some versions don't work properly together. I think this is because the newer versions of cook.bundle are intended for use with RealPlayer 10, and mplayer uses a codec from RealPlayer 9.
So go to the terminal and try to run mplayer on any convenient stream. For instance, type mplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio2/paul_jones.rpm at the command prompt and see if this produces sound. If it does, mplayer is fine. If it doesn't, the display on the terminal may suggest where the problem is.
4. You will need a copy of the lame encoder. If you don't already have it, go to versiontracker and search for lame. there are two sensible possibilities available as I write. One is iTunes-Lame encoder 2.0.8, the other is the newer lame encoder 3.96. It should not matter which you download. You will get an installer package which installs lame in a suitable place when you double-click it.
5. Now you are ready to download AlienBBC from the beta page of AlienBBC at www.mrtickle.org.
Decompress the file, and you get a folder with four items, two files custom-types.conf and slimserver-support.conf, and two folder Bin and Plugins. Control-click on SlimServer.prefPane and Show Package Contents. Copy the two files into the server folder (inside Contents). Copy the file mplayer.sh (which you may want to edit first, see the later step) into the Bin folder inside the Server folder. (Note. Copy, rather than move, as an upgrade of SlimServer will lose these copies, you still have the originals and can copy them into the new version.)
Depending on your installation of SlimServer, you will either have a folder /Library/SlimDevices or ~/Library/SlimDevices. If this does not already have a folder Plugins, you can move (moving is fine here, as this does not get lost on an upgrade) the Plugins folder into this folder. If you already have a Plugins folder, then move the folder Alien (inside the Plugins folder of AlienBBC) into this Plugins folder.
6. Nearly done, but you still have to make sure mplayer.sh can find mplayer.
One way is to edit mplayer.sh in a text editor (make sure the text editor allows line feeds as line ending, and not just carriage return which is the Mac default). You need to edit the second line
app=mplayer
and replace it by the path to your copy of mplayer, for instance
app=/usr/local/bin/mplayer.
I have been told of another method, but I haven't tried it. Use a text editor to create a file called profile.txt in your home directory and put one line of text in this file, the line
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
Now go to the terminal and type in
mv ~/profile.txt ~/.profile
(and press return, of course). this creates a file named .profile in your home directory (the file is invisible, as it begins with .). I think you can also use a text editor in the terminal to create .profile. An ordinary GUI text editor won't let you save a file with a name that begins with . so you have to use this work-around if you don't want to work with a text editor in the terminal, but it isn't actually hard to do that.
7. Finally, what about using with 5.4.1? I'll leave that to someone else. -- Daniel Cohen _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
