[Solved] A unique way to listen to radio streams?

rent0n · 2010-06-04 18:35:49

Hi there,

Basically I like to listen to two radios: BBC Radio 3 and Jazz FM.
The first one uses a wma format (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/listen/live/r3.asx) while the second one is a mms stream (mms://stream1.uk.ipercast.net/jazzfm.com/live1).

I would like to have a unique way to listen to online radio streams, no matter what is their format.
For Jazz FM I managed to use mpd+sonata and it works great. Unfortunately it seems impossible to listen to wma radio streams using mpd, so I'm forced to listen to BBC Radio 3 through Firefox.

Both of them seem to play quite nicely with gnome-mplayer but I find it to be rather unconfortable to play radio streams as every time I need to copy the address, then select File --> Open Location and paste the address.

Is there a simple way to play wma streams in mpd(-sonata)?
Or
Is there a way to play radio streams in (gnome-)mplayer in a way that streams address are saved to files and then just loaded, without having to paste the full address every time?

I hope my requests to be understandable...

Thank you!

Last edited by rent0n (2010-06-05 21:33:56)

brisbin33 · 2010-06-04 18:41:55

you could always just add two bash alaises:

alias play_bbc='mplayer http://bbc.co.uk/radio/listen/live/r3.asx'
alias play_jazz='mplayer mms://stream1.uk.ipercast.net/jazzfm.com/live1'

obviously add whatever mplayer flags are needed.

you could also write a wrapper script with favorites or read-from-file support, but that might be overkill.

Ogion · 2010-06-04 19:04:53

I made a little perl script for this puprpose some while ago.
It stores the urls and the stationnames in a hash-variable.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# radio.pl
# give "list" or a stationname as cli argument
# without argument enter interactive inputting a stationname
use strict;
use warnings;

my %stations = (
'barcelonajazz' => 'http://www.live365.com/play/jmestres',
'dradio' => 'http://dradio.ic.llnwd.net/stream/dradio_dlf_m_a.ogg',
'bbcworld' => 'mms://a973.l3944038972.c39440.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/973/39440/v0001/reflector:38972',
'radiopego' => 'http://www.radiopego.com:8000',
);
my @stationnames = keys %stations;
#my @links = values %stations; # not needed yet but might be useful
my $cliarg;
if ( defined $ARGV[0] ) {
    my $cliarg = $ARGV[0];
    if ( $cliarg eq "list" ) {
        print "@stationnames\n";
        exit 0;
    }
    if ( grep { $_ eq $cliarg } @stationnames ) {
        system("/usr/bin/mplayer -msgcolor -msgmodule $stations{$cliarg}");
    } else    {
        print "Please provide a valid radio station name commandline argument. (use \"list\" as argument to see a list of names)\n"; 
        exit 1;
    }
} else {
    my $selection;
    print "Enter the name of the radio station.", "\n";
    $selection = <STDIN>;
    chomp($selection);
    if ( grep { $_ eq $selection } @stationnames ) {
        system("/usr/bin/mplayer -msgcolor -msgmodule $stations{$selection}");
    } else    {
        print "Please provide a valid radio station name. (use \"list\" as argument to see a list of names)\n"; 
        exit 1;
    }
}

Also, you might want to check dmz's rpd for a more sophisticated approach to using a frontend to mplayer.

Ogion

Stebalien · 2010-06-04 19:26:53

You can recompile mpd with --enable-ffmpeg (download the PKGBUILD and edit it).
You can also try adding mplayer support http://www.musicpd.org/forum/index.php?topic=1261.0.

kokoko3k · 2010-06-05 07:04:21

Xt7-player or smplayer could work (just add the streams to the playlist)

dmz · 2010-06-05 10:14:19

When you say unique... May I suggest the Radio Playing Daemon?

The main purpose of this project is to make it as easy to listen to radio
streams (and control them) like it is to control MPD.

It uses mplayer as the backend, the channels are listed in the RPD::URI module
(./lib/RPD/URI.pm), it have playback history and the server/client model makes it
easy to add keybindings for switching channels, pause the playback, bump up the
volume etc.

I'm not used to bragging like this, but personally I think it kicks ass.

Edit: Oh, Ogion covered that already. Would you like to join the project?

Last edited by dmz (2010-06-05 10:16:03)

rent0n · 2010-06-05 21:33:39

Wow, I didn't expect to have such a variety of available solutions: I will definitely look into them (rpd especially) when I'll have some time.
For the time being, I just followed kokoko3k's advice and saved my streams as playlists on gnome-mplayer: it does the job.

Thank you very much guys, and feel free to continue posting other solutions!

Ogion · 2010-06-05 22:45:03

You were asking me, dmz? If so, thanks for the suggestion, but i didn't listen to any radio in the last months, so i didn't really look into rpd/use it yet. But i will keep it in mind

Ogion

Arch Linux

#1 2010-06-04 18:35:49

[Solved] A unique way to listen to radio streams?

#2 2010-06-04 18:41:55

Re: [Solved] A unique way to listen to radio streams?

#3 2010-06-04 19:04:53

Re: [Solved] A unique way to listen to radio streams?

#4 2010-06-04 19:26:53

Re: [Solved] A unique way to listen to radio streams?

#5 2010-06-05 07:04:21

Re: [Solved] A unique way to listen to radio streams?

#6 2010-06-05 10:14:19

Re: [Solved] A unique way to listen to radio streams?

#7 2010-06-05 21:33:39

Re: [Solved] A unique way to listen to radio streams?

#8 2010-06-05 22:45:03

Re: [Solved] A unique way to listen to radio streams?

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