Reader Richard Myerly would like to use his new laptop to stream radio, specifically Florida’s sports talk AM station, 560 WQAM. He writes:
The station uses a media player that is not available for my MacBook with a Core Duo chip. Can you help me?
Oh sure. You need to do a couple of things. The first is to download the free Flip4Mac WMV plug-in that allows you to play Windows Media streams—the variety of stream used by WQAM—on your Mac. Flip4Mac is now Universal and so works with your MacBook.
Even with the Flip4Mac components installed, WQAM’s streamer doesn’t work with the default configuration of Safari running on an Intel Mac. But you can force it to.
To do so, quit Safari, select its icon in the Applications folder, press Command-I, and in the resulting Info window, enable the Open Using Rosetta option that appears within the General area of the window. Launch Safari, travel to WQAM’s site, click the Listen Live link, click the flashing Listen Live link at the bottom of the resulting page, sit through the obnoxious Bell South commercial, and wait until the WQAM Sports Radio window pops up and begins playing the stream.
Note that when you ask Safari to run under Rosetta, it’s going to run more slowly than it would natively. With that in mind, when browsing elsewhere you might want to quit Safari, switch the Rosetta option off, and relaunch, or devote one browser to listening to these streams (use Firefox running under Rosetta, for example) and another for browsing.