The playlist (.pls) file format is without doubt one of the most popular formats when it comes to Internet radio stations. All it takes to tune into a radio station is to open the .pls file in a compatible player. Whenever I try to load a playlist file on my system Windows makes the suggestion to use Windows Media Player to play the file.
The only problem here is that Windows Media Player is not supporting the pls file format. Users who try it anyway receive the following error message:
Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file.
Open PLS in WMP is a free software program for the Windows operating system that acts as a proxy between the pls file and Microsoft’s media player. Download the program from the Internet’s Codeplex project page first. The program has not been updated for three years now but it still works perfectly even with the latest Microsoft operating system and windows Media Player.
Installation should be straightforward and pose no troubles whatsoever. What you need to do afterwards is to assign the .pls file format with the newly installed Open PLS in WMP application. You do that by right-clicking a pls file on the system and selecting Properties from the context menu.
Click on the change button, navigate to the Open PLS in WMP folder (defaults to the program files folder) and select the executable there.
You can alternatively start a playlist file directly on an Internet page, but only if Windows displays a file open dialog which leads to the process described above.
All pls files in Windows are from that moment on opened with Open PLS in WMP. The program extracts the stream information from the files and sends the information to Windows Media Player where the stream is then played like other music.
You may see a warning message about AAC streams when you load streams. I’m not entirely sure why it is displayed, it did not hinder playback of the playlist files that I tried. Just close the message and Windows Media Player should start playing pls files.
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
Add to del.icio.us, digg, facebook, reddit, twitter
Post tags: internet-radio, playlist, pls, windows media player
0 comments:
Post a Comment