Yes, since this is a discontinued player I'm not expecting any support. Thanks for your time in answering my question!!

You nailed it, I had broken DNS resolution somehow last night, so the hostnames didn't resolve. After I fixed that, "play" complained that it couldn't find the proper codec.

So I've gone in a completely different direction. Madplay (after judiciously commenting out some lines) works well, and some pipes finish the work.

curl -s <streamhere> | tee song.mp3 | madplay -v -

I'm thinking of making a nice front-end for this and slapping a choice in the "games" menu to facilitate selecting / entering shoutcast streams.

Has anyone else added some features into their central?

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Instructions to get madplay working with the hardcoded 2 channel 44.1kHz sound:

audio_oss.c
if (ioctl(sfd, SNDCTL_DSP_SYNC, 0) == -1) {
//audio_error = ":ioctl(SNDCTL_DSP_SYNC)";
//return -1;
}