I blogged a few days about about how I was moving back to Slimserver (aka SqueezeCenter). Today I started wondering how to listen to the stream on my iPod Touch. A quick search came up with an app called CastCatcher from Return7. It took me a while to figure it out, but if your Slimserver is passworded, you need to prepend the login to the front of the URL for the stream, like http://username:password@XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:9000/stream.mp3, otherwise, just use http://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:9000/stream.mp3. (Obviously, XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX can either be the IP address of the server or a domain name if you are using one. Basically, the standard Slimserver URL; nothing special.)
Once you get the player to connect, you’ll need to limit the bitrate lower than the default 320k. Apparently, Slimserver streams too fast for CastCatcher to handle. If you’ve never done this, the setting can be hard to find. First, go into SqueezeCenter settings and select the Player tab. There are two a pop-up menus just below the tabs. The left one chooses which player you are changing, since there could be more than one. My CastCatcher shows up as “Mozilla from 192.168.1.50”, but yours will likely be different. After the player is selected, choose Audio from the pop-up menu on the right. Change the Bitrate limiting to 64k, 96k or 128k.
That’s it! CastCatcher is only $1.99 in the iTunes store. Seems to crash every so often, but generally I’m happy with it.
One consideration – won’t work if you are running slimserver on a NAS duo server as you won’t be able to slow the bitrate.