Opening a remote MP3 stream

Hi.

I want to test if a web radio is online, by trying to connect to the remote stream.

I could use a Windows Media Player ActiveX control, and call the method
IWMPCore :: putURL() , that reproduces a remote file/stream.
The problem is that the method returns always S_OK even if the stream is not online.

Another solution i think is using Direct Show API, but i don't know a line of code of it....

Please could you post here a C++ code fragment that does this, either using WMP or DirectShow or other APIs?

thanks a lot