Listening to 750AM, Finally

I enjoy listening to various talk shows on one of my local radio stations, but until very recently, it was impossible for me to listen on my laptop. The station has gone through a couple of iterations of Windows-only internet delivery options despite the ready availability of more inclusive alternatives. I fail to grasp why some companies practically bend over backwards to exclude certain users, but that's another story altogether.

The purpose of this post is that 750AM is finally obtainable from Linux. Using Firefox 1.5 and current mplayer rpms, I am able to go to the 750AM streaming site and listen. The screen is stilled jumbled, but the play button is easily recognizable.

Even better, using 'ps auwx', I found the command line arguments passed to mplayer. I stripped off some of the browser related options, and I wound up creating the following alias:
alias 750am='mplayer -user-agent NSPlayer -osdlevel 0 -nojoystick -cookies -slave -cache 512 mms://uni4.cox.streamaudio.com/WSB_AM'

This allows me to listen by simply typing '750am' on the command line, leaving my browser less cluttered.

Happy listening.