This site is not affiliated with, operated by, or endorsed by the CBC.
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
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.