Like electronic music? Like listening to it at your PC? I have good news for you….

A while back, digitally imported, one of my two favorite streaming sources of music (the other is Soma.fm, give them some love) decided to restrict ad-supported streaming to only their mobile app due to “licensing agreements”.  The only way you could get the regular stream was to become a Premium member at $7 a month.

Now, I do kick in money to Soma.fm annually, but usually around $25 a year.  (And you should support Soma as well – they’re worth supporting.)

And while I’d be willing to do the same for di – or listen to ads – they insist that only counts if I’m using my phone or tablet to listen.

Which is stupid.

(Please note, you folks at digitally imported, that I’m not only saying that I would pay $25 a year for a low-quality premium service, but I’d encourage others to as well.  But alas, we can’t.)

So some enterprising person posted a workaround on CommandLine-Fu. I took that base (which relies on the cross-platform mplayer) and created a quick way to peruse the current stations available by just scrolling down and playing it by pressing enter.

Technically, it will register for di as if you’re listening from an Android device – which in my case, would be true, except that I just don’t want to unplug my speakers and plug them into my phone. So they should still get whatever credit they would originally, so we’re not stealing anything. I just heard an ad for Verizon, JC Penny, PetSmart, and Progressive insurance, so they should still be getting the ad revenue they’d get otherwise.

And should they change the format of the icecast directory or the version of the Android app, it should be a simple substitution to fix.

You can snag my script at https://github.com/uriel1998/simple_listen_to_di. It should work for anyone who has bash – so OSX and Linux folks.  (Windows folks, check out the CommandLineFu link so you can plug it in directly.)

And again, if someone from digitally imported stumbles across this, give us an option to subscribe for less and have low-quality streams.