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.