In this article, you'll find some pointers on listening/watching to live streams with certain software applications.
MPlayer is a very good application when it comes to live streams. It supports a whole deal of protocols, including those of windows (mms://).
The only "drawback" is that MPlayer by default sets its cache to 8MB. For video over LAN, this is not really an issue, but when listening to a low bitrate audio stream on the internet, it takes a long time to fill up that cache.
The easiest way to listen to a live stream:
mplayer -cache size-in-KB "stream-url (e.g. http://)"
Be sure to set cache size to something more sane:
Note that these numbers are not "fixed". You can choose whatever you want. Make sure that you adjust the numbers if your internet/network connection has higher latency and suffers from hickups.
More to come...