Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Radio Tray: A Shoutcast Linux app



Radio Tray is an online radio streaming player that runs on a Linux system tray. Its goal is to have the minimum interface possible, making it very straightforward to use.
Radio Tray is not a full featured music player, there are plenty of excellent music players already. However, there was a need for a simple application with minimal interface just to listen to online radios. And that's the sole purpose of Radio Tray.
Radio Tray is Free Software, licensed under the GPL.

Features

plays most media formats (based on gstreamer libraries)
bookmarks support, with sorting
easy to use
supports PLS playlist format (Shoutcast/Icecast)
supports M3U playlist format
supports ASX, WAX and WVX playlist format




*Preceding images and information about Radio Tray from the Radio Tray website:
http://radiotray.sourceforge.net

I personally am a fan of the program because of it's minimilistic nature.

I set it to start automatically. (I add it to System > Preferences > Startup Applications on Ubuntu.)

A station i suggest is anything from the Sky.com series, including their awesome 80's station. I also like Highway 181.

Here are the addresses of my favorite channels:

181.fm Classic Hits - http://sc-rly.181.fm:80/stream/1094

977 Classic rock - http://icecast3.977music.com/classicrock

977 80's - http://icecast3.977music.com/80s

Sky.fm 80's - http://listen.sky.fm/public3/the80s.pls

Sky.fm 70's - http://scfire-dtc-aa03.stream.aol.com:80/stream/1076

And my favorite, a channel from 181.fm. An excellent classic country station:
http://38.107.220.164:8018

If your interested, you can download Radio Tray here:
http://radiotray.sourceforge.net

There is no apt-get option (or synaptic, for that matter) available for this program as of Ubuntu 10.04/10.10, but their is a .deb package that will work just fine for Ubuntu.

5 comments:

  1. Hi, how did you get the station URLs? When I go to a site, say .977.com, I get the option to launch Windows Media Player or a Flash player to listen to music. When I look at the URL for the station it will have the app name in it, like this one for Windows Media Player:
    http://www.977music.com/channels2/80s/wmplayer80s.php

    I would like a URL to plug into Radio Tray, but one that does not link to Windows Media Player or a Flash player.

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  2. I am afraid you are stuck with one or the other. That doesn't mean though that you must run the Windows Media Player version in Windows Media Player. You could run it just as easily via something like mplayer for the console, or Radio Tray.

    It's just a stream in a format that Windows Media Player can recognise.

    Choose the Windows Media Player version, and then on the far right of the player controls, click the up arrow on the bar, and choose copy.

    You will now have the URL for the stream you want.

    This is only for .977, as every place will have their own way of storing this info.

    For instance, Shoutcast.com stores it in the html file that brings up the player, not in the player itself.

    So for Shoutcast URL's, you download the tunein-station.pls file for the corresponding station you want, and the first http: address is your stream address.

    I.E. the station "COOL93 fahrenheit" has a stream URL of http://88.191.111.120:8006, found in the tunein-station.pls file from Shoutcast, which i downloaded by right clicking the link for COOL93, and chose "Save links as".

    (P.S. this might be different in your browser, but some form of this option will be available.)

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  3. Thanks for the review Dennis.
    About the apt-get, radio tray is on the ubuntu repositories. You can do "apt-get install radiotray" to get it. However, it's not the most recent version.

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  4. good to know, is that in the multiverse? I couldn't find it in the repositories for 10.04, which is the version I am currently using. (I like to stay with the lts's.)

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  5. It's only on Maverick, but it's in universe.

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