Having made my own list of favourite internet radio stations available online, I was quite interested to hear about the "Pirate Radio Toolbar." I downloaded and installed the toolbar, and found it offered an impressive list of pirate radio stations. Most are pirate radio stations that also stream over the internet, a lot of the others were internet based stations that also play underground music.
The toolbar software itself is created (or rather configured) using the Conduit website. Conduit allows anyone to sign up to create similar toolbars for commercial use. These toolbars can be configured to have many different features, one of which is a radio playlist.
My sole interest was the list of stations, since I regularly enjoy listening to internet radio. The rest of the tool bar offered nothing I wanted; it merely obscured the top of my web browser. It seemed much more appropriate to listen using a more fully featured purpose built program like VLC Media Player to tune in. With music playing in another program you can obviously hide the player behind your browser!
So I mused with the idea of extracting the relevant data into an appropriate format. Using the Fiddler HTTP debugger, the URL for their play list data became apparent quite quickly.
The play list for the Pirate Radio Toolbar (and other Conduit toolbars) arrives over the web in an XML format, which is ideal for manipulation with the XSLT (the programming language used for my website). So I wrote some XSLT code to convert the playlist into an XSPF format, ideal for use in VLC Media Player.
I wrote a shell script to download the Pirate Radio Toolbar station list using wget, and convert it using xsltproc and my XSLT stylesheet code. This script runs nightly using cron, so my copy of the station list should keep up to date with any new stations they add.
I even wrote a couple of extra XSLT stylesheets to convert XSPF to the PLS and extended M3u file formats. I make use of these stylesheets to generate my own dynamic radio playlist now. I might post this XSLT code up for download in case anyone else wants to do similar conversions.
Please visit my radio page for more details. I host my own radio station play list, which exclusively comprises high bitrate drum and bass, jungle and dubstep.