CBC Radio

cbcradio.net is an iPhone OS-friendly web application that allows you to listen to CBC Radio live streams and podcasts in the background and control playback with the headset. It was written by Grant Heaslip, and was built using jQTouch, Sinatra, Haml, and Ruby. You can find the code on GitHub, and I'm happy to accept any fixes or new features you may cook up.

As stated on the homepage, this site is not affiliated with, operated by, or endorsed by the CBC. This site isn't making me any money, and isn't intended to infringe upon the CBC's business. It's simply a fun side project that solves a couple of problems that I and others had with the CBC Radio iPhone app, and makes the programming of the public broadcaster that much more accessible. The home screen icon is copied from the CBC Radio iPhone app. If asked to, I will shut down this site and turn the domain name over to the CBC.

The CBC Radio iPhone app

The CBC does offer a great iPhone app, but it has a couple of annoying limitations. First, it cannot run in the background, so if you want to check your email, reply to a message, or run another app, you're out of luck. Secondly, it doesn't respond to the play/pause button on the iPhone headset (even worse, the iPod app does, and starts playing whatever it was playing last).

This site will run in the background and will respond to the play/pause button, making for a much better experience.

Neither of the aforementioned problems are the CBC's fault—they are simply limitations imposed by iPhone OS. Multitasking is coming in the summer of 2010, but I'm unsure about app access to the headset controls.

Known limitations

cbcradio.net can't be run as a full screen webapp. This is because full screen Safari windows are treated as separate instances of Safari, and thus can't play audio in the background (much like proper apps).
If a live stream is paused for more than a few seconds, it will time out and have to be restarted manually. Safari evidently isn't too smart in how it handles live streams.
When media playback is ended, an empty Safari window remains open. I haven't found a way to work around this that doesn't make the main window refresh, which is arguably even more annoying.
The interface is somewhat unresponsive. This is due to the way that Safari waits up to 300ms for a second tap so it knows whether to zoom or click. The delay is more noticable in the context of a native-looking app, but it happens whenever you click a link in Safari. jQTouch includes a workaround, but I'll need to spend time reworking some parts of the site for it to not introduce some irritating bugs in the interface.
Toolbar icons don't animate like those in proper iPhone apps. I'm not sure if this is possible in jQTouch, but it's on my radar.
Audio streams will sometimes include loud pops. I've only observed this streaming via 3G, and have not been able to reproduce it consistently.
Only the latest episodes of podcasts are available right now. I may eventually make anything in the feed accessible, but you're probably better off subscribing to the podcasts in iTunes for that sort of use case.
Only a few podcasts are listed right now. Once I have the time, I'll expand the list.
Radio-Canada (the CBC's french language radio network) streams and podcasts aren't yet listed. I'll be adding these when I get the chance.

Feedback

Feedback should be sent to I try to respond to email as fast as possible, but that doesn't always happen. I test using the latest version of iPhone OS, and probably can't do much to help you if you're using an earlier or prerelease version of iPhone OS, or if you're using a different platform entirely.

CBC Radio

About

CBC Radio 1

Ontario

Québec

British Columbia

Alberta

Manitoba

Saskatchewan

Nova Scotia

New Brunswick

Newfoundland & Labrador

Prince Edward Islannd

Northern Canada

CBC Radio 2

CBC Radio 3

CBC Podcasts

National