понеделник, 3 октомври 2011 г.

Radio in Linux

I'm a big fan of listening to radio, so for me, it was very important to have a way to listen to may favorite stations while I'm working on my laptop.
So, to listen to online radio in Linux, you need very few things.
Mainly:
GStreamer (python-gst >= 0.10) for the audio processing.
Using GStreamer, you can play radio from url using:
$gst-launch-0.10 playbin uri=http://ns57.ovh.net:80/
In this example, the radio is Alouette, a French radio. Of course,  you can use any kinds of streaming url-s.
If you need an application to play your favorite radio stations, you can use pretty much all the players, and if you install the package kradio, you can also receive information about the song being played in real time.
Finally, an application I found just today is radiotray-0.6.4. It is very sweet and light (28Mb right now), it installs a tray, from where you can change easily all the stations you like. You can also add stations using the gui, to sort them, put them in different groups and so on. If you're not such a fan of gui or you want to import a larger list, then the config files are found in
~/.local/share/radiotray/
There are two files, from where you can set up the configs of the player and also the PLAYLIST.
Just open bookmarks.xml with your favorite text editor and use
<group name="My stations">
 <bookmark name="cherieFM" url="http://mp3.live.tv-radio.com/cherie_fm/all/che_124310.mp3"/> 
<bookmark name="NRJ Hits" url="http://mp3.live.tv-radio.com/nrj_hits/all/nrj_150726.mp3"/> 
</group>
to list your favorite stations and order them in whatever way you find suitable.
Enjoy!