Been messing around with both STARPLAYR, and SIRIUSMAC for a while now…
The basic issue is that I am in an office that faces East South East, about the worst place to be to pick up any satellite broadcast set for the continental United States. I think if I wanted to work for it and go back to XM (Not going to happen) I could probably get a marginal signal. My old office pretty much faced West, no problem for either XM or Sirius receiver, I know I had both while there. The solution to the dilemma was an online player, and being an Mac guy meant doing some funky tricks to make it work, or go virtual win and use a native player there.
My initial salvation was SiriusMac, Great player made to look like the stiletto, but the issue I had/have with it is the lack of feedback when a button is pressed, and with the latency to get the stream going, it was kind of a pain in the butt. Continued freakyness left me not real happy…
One day while looking for something completely unrelated on apple’s download site, I came across StarPlayr, while the interface is not quite as polished, it has three nice big buttons, Play, Stop and Record… and when you press them, there is an immediate visual feedback, that says hey I’m a button and I was pressed, and a spinning I’m working on your request spinner appears. The other thing that is cool, is the ability pause like the Sportsters and Starmates, and Stilettos, so you don’t miss any Howard when the phone rings, this is not a 100% proposition, but it works most of the time. I have also been playing with Starcasting aka recording, and the ability to schedule recordings and automatically import them to iTunes so that you can listen later on you schedule ala Sitletto. I have not had a 100% success with the conversion part, but the scheduling via iCal works great, so I at a minimum have an ASF file that can be played with VLC Media player, so all is not lost.
So being the function over form guy that I am, I’ll be sticking with StarPlayr for a while
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