- Open BBC iPlayer in Google Chrome.
- Click on the 'Radio' tab.
- Under 'Radio Stations' click a station.
- Click 'Listen Live'. The player will open in a popup window.
- Right click on the title bar of the popup window and select 'Show as tab'. The player window will change to a standard Chrome window with tab and toolbars.
- Click on the page menu (the page icon to the right of the address bar) and select 'Create Application Shortcuts'.
- Tick 'Desktop' (or wherever you want the shortcut to be placed).
- Click 'Create'.
Now test the newly created shortcut by clicking it. It should open the radio player in a new Chrome 'application' window and start playing automatically.
You can resize the application window to fit the player, and next time you open it it should remember this window size.
You can change the icon from the rather fuzzy BBC icon it has by default to something a bit nicer:
- Create a 32px x 32px image.
- Save it as a .ico file (I use the ICO Photoshop plugin but there are free/online tools that'll let you do this).
- Right click on the radio player shortcut and select 'Properties'
- Click the 'Change icon' button.
- Find the new icon you created and click 'Apply'.
5 comments:
Matt, Thank you so much for this. Really helpful. The real breakthrough was "show as tab". In Chrome 10.0.648.205 I don't see the page icon to the right of the address bar. I may have switched it off of course. My workaround was to create a short-cut in the normal way and then drag that to the desktop. Yours, Tim
PS One has to ask why the BBC make this so hard and do not provide the icon to drag to the desktop...
Thank you Matt.
Thank you Matt...
Very useful. Been pondering this for a while...!
Paul Richards
I know this post is nearly 4 years old but it has just come in really handy. I recently reset my Windows 8 installation and, of course, had to re-install everything. When I came to re-install the desktop iPlayer application, I found it no longer supports live radio or TV.
This allowed me to put a shortcut, not only on my desktop but on taskbar as well; allowing me to switch on radio 2 in the morning without having to visit the website.
Thanks very much.
This post is almost 7 years old now but it's just helped me out tremendously. I was getting tired of how the iPlayer radio hogs so much resources on firefox and was trying to work out how to make a simple shortcut using Chrome. It works a little differently now (More Tools/Add to Desktop...) but certainly did the job. Thank you.
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