Internet radio is fast becoming just as popular as terrestrial and satellite radio, providing an equally robust medium for listening to music, news, and talk with access to literally thousands of online stations and podcasts. The ATC-AUDIONET Internet Radio Tuner Card provides a powerful solution for integrating Internet radio as part of a complete Crestron® entertainment system.
The World of Internet Radio
Crestron Internet radio lets you easily browse and search through over 15,000 free online radio stations and podcasts and instantly play them throughout your home without requiring a separate computer. From a Crestron touch screen or Web browser, you can browse the station guide by format, location, or language. Or, search for a specific station or podcast by name, call letters, or any other keywords. Then save and organize your favorites for easy recall at any time.
The station guide is constantly being updated with diverse programming from around the world, so whether you're looking for news and entertainment from your local community radio station or from your homeland on another continent, you'll almost certainly find it.
Pandora®, SiriusXM®, and More
Just enter the name of any musical artist, song, or composer and Pandora instantly creates a "station" streaming related music for your listening pleasure. Save up to 99 stations and recall them on demand from a Crestron touch screen. Touch screen control lets you view the current playing song, artist, and album cover, and provides controls for creating or browsing stations and pausing, skipping, ranking, and bookmarking individual songs and artists.[1]
With your paid SiriusXM subscription, you can enjoy over 130 channels of music, comedy, sports, news, and talk from this leading content provider.[2]
You can even listen to free audiobooks courtesy of LibriVox.org. Additional services may be added in the future.
An Enhanced Touch Screen Experience
Enjoying your choice of music, talk, books, and other content is enhanced through support for metadata and transport controls. Many Internet radio stations let you view detailed information about what's currently playing, and some even let you pause, rewind, repeat, or skip tracks as they're playing. The ATC-AUDIONET enables access to these features for those stations that support them right through your Crestron touch screen.
Modular Tuner Card
Internet radio is available for the CEN-TRACK TunerRack Modular Multi-Tuner, as well as for Adagio® AES, AMS, and AMS-AIP systems. With any of these devices, the ATC-AUDIONET tuner card can be installed in any available tuner card slot, providing a single Internet radio tuner alongside other AM/FM, satellite, or additional CEN-AUDIONET tuner cards. The card provides both stereo analog and SPDIF digital output signals[3], and when installed in an Adagio system its output feeds only the first input associated with the card slot in which it is installed[4].
The beauty of Internet radio is there are no clumsy antennas needed to gain access to all the different content that's available. To enable Internet radio service using the ATC-AUDIONET, each card simply requires an Ethernet connection to the control system LAN with broadband access to the Internet.
Web Browser Management
Finding and managing all your favorite Internet radio stations is a breeze using the Crestron Internet Radio Website. Simply register your tuner card at https://radio.crestron.com and begin exploring all the available stations through your computer's Web browser. Use live preview to listen to each station right on your computer, then save the ones you want to access from your control system touch screen or handheld remote, and filter out all the ones that don't interest you. Even add unlisted stations by simply entering the URL of any compatible stream.
Extra Features
The ATC-AUDIONET card provides additional capabilities for the playback of audio files loaded on its internal memory card. Use it to generate sounds or to play pre-canned music and announcements. Sound files and playlists can be loaded simply from any networked computer using a Samba™ compatible file manager like Windows® Explorer or Mac® Finder®. Playing a file or playlist is enabled through your control system program, allowing any sound to be scheduled or triggered manually via a button press or any other control event.[5]
The ATC-AUDIONET can also stream any compatible audio file that has a URL address, providing a means for accessing Internet radio stations that aren't included in the station guide, or for streaming custom sound files loaded on a local Web server.