The window should fill up with station names. Double-click one of the online stations at the top, or select a station and press the > button at the bottom, and Streamer will begin searching for a feed for that station.  Normally, this feed will come from another listener who still have some spare upload bandwidth and can send the stream to you. The title bar will change to indicate that you have selected a station to tune. In a moment or two, the station will start playing back either within Streamer or in your default player for .pls files. Click the -> button in the upper right corner to open the status panel if you want to see what is happening in more detail. If you click the Config button... You will see this configuration display. One of the first things Streamer does when you launch it for the first time is test your available upload bandwidth.  When the test finishes, this number will be in the Upload field in this screen.  You can adjust these parameters here yourself and retest if you have something different than a 128k upload. NOTE: If this test takes longer than 2 minutes, you have either selected too high of an upload speed for your actual connection, or there could be a firewall issue.  Click the HELP link on the left side of this page for additional notes that may help you resolve the issue.  Please do NOT click Skip Test unless a Streamer support representative tells you to do so.

Streamer is like a radio tuner and includes an internal player. It can however also be configured to pass the audio to whatever player you already have installed. This will work in most cases.  Streamer cannot however make any player play something that it won't play otherwise.  If you choose the external player for playback in the Streamer config screen, Streamer will try and launch whatever audio playback application that is set to play .pls files on your system.  Please note that RealAudio or Windows Media Player will NOT playback OGG streams at this point.  The full installation of Winamp is by far the most compatible external player that we have found and has been thoroughly tested with Streamer.  Please note that the lite installation of Winamp does NOT contain the necessary decoders for OGG.

To change the station, double-click on it's name or click the O(stop) button, select another station and click the >(play) button. Streamer will release the current stream, and then search for the new stream. To close streamer, close the window with the X at the top right. There can be a delay before it actually closes or tunes in the new station.  This delay happens when you are sending to someone else and Streamer needs a bit of time to switch that someone else to another feed before it can release yours.

What the buttons do

Top section buttons:

List
Shows the stations list

Chat 1
Opens the chat channel selection menu. 
The first time you use chat you need to enter a name in the top right box and press OK. There is a small X there too that is used to disconnect from the chat room.  Also note that this is a very basic chat system.  It does not recognise any standard IRC commands and cannot be connected to with any IRC type software.  It is still in development and will improve over time.

Between Chat1 and Config is the Song Title display.

Config
Sets the bandwidth, and the Advanced configuration options.

Help
Opens the Streamer web site in your browser.

->
Displays the right side status panel. This button will turn to <- when the status panel is open and when clicked will hide the panel.

Bottom section buttons:

<< (rewind)
Jumps playback backwards a few seconds

> (play)
Starts audio playback or tunes in the station selected in the list above.

|| (pause)
Pause playback *

O
Stops Streamer receiving the stream. It may take up to 30 seconds to stop, and if you are using an external player, the audio may continue for a while as it plays out the buffered data.

>> (fast fwd)
Jumps playback forward a few seconds

In between the >> button and the DJ Chat button is a slider control.  This control is used to adjust the volume of the internal player.

DJ Chat
Opens the chat channel for the currently tuned station.
This channel will only be accessible if you are the broadcaster of this station or listening to this station.

View
Displays the station's embedded-in-stream web display.

These advanced buttons are above the status panel

Bcast
Sets the configuration options necessary for broadcasting. See Broadcasting

Hosts
Shows a list of IP's of other streamers, and some other info.

Flows
Measurements of the p2p data flow in and out, plus info about bandwidth calculations, the current stream, and each outgoing feed.
This and the Hosts screen above are mostly for debugging.

* not yet implemented