It is now a scientifically proven fact that listening to radio, specially talk radio, can lower your blood pressure, can make you less tense and it can even help you go through everyday work without feeling any pain. And now when thousands of the internet radio stations from all over the world are available, you don’t have to depend on your old car radio or the FM radio app that comes in your smartphone. In fact, if you want to listen to your favorite radio station everyday, why not make Windows auto-play it at system startup. Here is how :
- Download XMPlay from https://www.un4seen.com/. Extract xmplay.exe from the downloaded ZIP file to a folder. For example, I have extracted it in D:\xmplay38 folder.
- Visit SHOUTcast directory (https://directory.shoutcast.com/) and download the M3U file for your favorite radio station. You can do this by clicking on the download icon next to a radio station and then clicking on Any player (.m3u). The downloaded file will be named something like tunein-station.m3u.
- Place the M3U file tunein-station.m3u in the same folder as xmplay.exe.
- Press Win+R to open the Run dialog, type shell:startup and press Enter.
- Create a TXT file in the folder that opens as a result of step 4, change its contents to the following (make sure you change the folder path to one you used):
@echo off start /D D:\xmplay38\ xmplay.exe tunein-station.m3u exit
- Rename the TXT file create in step 5 to radio.bat.
- This is it, now you are all set. Now when you start Windows, it will automatically launch XMPlay audio player and it will start playing your favorite radio station.
But you don’t have to test the setup by restarting Windows. You can just double-click on the radio.bat file to see how it works. The first time XMPlay launches, it has default appearance and settings. If you change its appearance and settings, they will be saved for the next time.