Hey blobby, I noticed that too, but the stop button is under the "controls" button, in the upper right.  It's also where the volume slider is.  I thought it would be nice to have a mute button, but the stop button works just as well.  When you push stop, it turns into a play button.

Yeh I do realise the stop is in the controls function; I just personally prefer the interface to be more continuous and standardised like the Shoutcast interface, My Streams interface et al where there is a play and stop button next to each other.

I also dislike the immediate play functionality too.

Made it thru another song and a half and it rebooted again

General comments:

I like the album art.  The next step would be to do something when touching the album, like get more information about the album, or where it sits on the charts, or how popular it sits at the station.

I, too, wish the stop button would be visible.

I appreciate Christian's comment where he says he'd like to remain on the list of stations until the panel is idle, then move to the album cover/station art view.  This gives the user more control over the music by making it easy to choose, and it's easier to fix a mistaken choice.  Although it's not immediately important to me, anything that furthers choice would be mo' better.

I have not found a station with lyrics, but then I didn't try too hard.  I'd rather not see the Lyrics button if none is available.

I have not found a way to block stations from appearing.  Though I'm sure some stations are very good, talk radio in Houston, for example, is not very relevant in Boston, MA.

Personal comments:

None of these stations appeal to me, so my time spent beta testing this new feature is rather short.  If there was an RSS feed or similar that I could periodically visit to find out about new stations, I'd appreciate it.  It could then be a widget in my rotation -- an iheartradio news widget.

I wanted to add that while listening to iheartradio last night, my Chumby sort of rebooted.  When I looked over at it, the control panel was downloading and then it went straight to my widget stream.  I think I was listening for about 10 minutes when it happened.

i can see that there are clear channel radio stations on this app, is there any chance of being able to access all the clear channel stations (i have been trying to access a radio station (G105.1, (durham- realigh)) on clear channel for months now) or if there was a way to find the url to type into the chumby.

thanks

This is a great feature.  This is the solution for finding good talk radio stations that I have been looking for.  I am hoping that eventually all of the iheartradio stations will be available. 

Operation of the software has worked quickly and reliably for me.  Excellent job, Chumby.

It's a fun, but, not stable yet. Crushes frequently when I listening to WSIX Nashville and goes back to the default channel automatically.

Are there any plans for making it possible to search or browse the stations via genre? I love the widget, but it really is a teaser with only a handful of the hundreds of stations at iheartmusic.

We're not *against* WMA - it requires a patent license from Microsoft, and we've tried to minimize the number of licenses required in the product in order to keep it as Open as possible.

If we add WMA, we'd have to close more of the source code than we currently do.

Feel free to add WMA - the source code for BlueTune is posted, and it's possible to add it - this is what we call "hacking". Be sure to get that patent license, though, if you're in the United States.

It's not a matter of copyright - it's a matter of patents.  The Microsoft patent license for WMA *explicit* excludes implementations released under "copyleft" licenses such as the GPL - this is a rather extraordinary condition they place that one doesn't typically see in the other codec licenses.

There's *plenty* of code that implements WMA, even under the GPL, however, as a commercial enterprise, we can't distribute it (at least in the US and Japan) without obtaining the appropriate *patent* license.  As you probably know, we can't withhold source to GPL components (most of the system) if we ship binaries, and we can't create a derivative work that combines both GPL and code released under an incompatible license, as would be the case to comply with Microsoft's patent license.

So, to support WMA, we'd have to rewrite the entire music subsystem and codecs without using any open source code, just to support the one codec, and even *pay* an ongoing royalty to Microsoft for the privilege of doing so.

So there you go - it's not for grins and giggles that Linux distros do not include WMA support built into their free-as-in-freedom distributions. They're typically added post-install from third-party repositories with a "wink/nudge" approach that won't work for chumby's architecture. You'll notice that the iPod family doesn't support WMA either, even though, in some cases, the processors support the decoding in hardware - they don't include the patent license.

If you have issues with this, it's not Linux or us at fault here - we all *want* support for WMA out of the box. It's Microsoft, for attempting to leverage their patent portfolio against other companies and operating systems. Take it up with them.