Like many a lightphone user, my experience with this device has been a mixture of absolute frustration, followed by even more frustration. Yet, for some reason I still love the thing. One of my biggest gripes has been the way music is added. Never-mind that I haven't maintained a collection of media (physical or otherwise) since the dial-up era... Who wants to upload the files they do *cough* acquire through a dashboard? Why no local access? And why the transcoding? Maybe I want garbage bitrate or a different format to save space! As of this writing the music tool does not support playback from URLs. The podcast tool does however allow for custom RSS feeds.

The idea is pretty simple; find the direct stream link from your favorite streaming provider, add it to an RSS feed, and see if it works. And it does!

Getting the right combination of tags and formatting to get passed the error mentioned here was the hardest part, as there seemed to be no rhyme or reason why things didn't work. Until they finally did.

While this workaround does technically work, it's not without its bugs or usability issues. Following are a few things I've noticed thus far:

• Playback takes anywhere from ~30 to ~60 seconds to start depending on the stream's bitrate. Higher bitrate streams will start sooner, whereas lower bitrate streams will take a solid minute before they start playing. My assumption is this is a function of some pre-buffer filling before playback will start. And since filling that buffer is limited to the stream bitrate, it can and does take a while.
• No metadata support to show what is currently playing. This is to be expected as this information is typically provided by the rss feed itself and normally wouldn't get updated on-the-fly.
• Clicking the download button while streaming will start saving the stream. You can view this as a bug or a feature. Once the download button is clicked, there is no way to stop the download unless you remove all network connectivity. Stopping playback will not stop the download, and I've not tested to see what happens when local storage fills up. This is actually kind of handy if you want to save a stream for offline playback, however whatever is recorded will disappear the next time the stream is played after network connectivity is restored. YMMV
• Battery life will obviously take a major hit if you're doing a lot of streaming, but you probably knew that already...
• Naked ampersand (&) are not allowed anywhere and will break the dashboards ability to parse the rss file
• No progress indicator or timestamp

If you'd like to try this hack for yourself, start with the aNONradio feed and edit it to your liking.

Questions or comments you can find me idling in COM 60% of the time, every time.

~ allenp