Radio Tray

[spottedhog]

http://radiotray.sourceforge.net/

I got tired of Amarok being a little buggy with Internet Radio Stations, so I googled to find some other application, and lo and behold, I found Radio Tray!.

Just wow is about the best way to describe it! Simple and small and it works perfectly.

...nuff said

[dibl]

Re: Radio Tray

Thanks -- I didn't know about radio tray.

Kaffeine does a fine job on radio streams too, FYI.

[spottedhog]

Re: Radio Tray

One neat feature is that the volume control is independent. By this I mean I can mouseover and turn down/off the volume while I view a video at normal volume.

(yes, I am easily impressed...)

[dibl]

Re: Radio Tray

A lot of commercial radio streams seem to be using flash or other proprietary players. Is there any way to get those to play with the radio tray? Examples:

http://www.945litefm.com/main.html

http://www.wduv.com/

[arochester]

Re: Radio Tray

I can't help (yet?) with 945litefm because I'm outside the US.

One of the biggest problems with some radio streams is that they use Java and this masks the source.

One tip I got years ago (Rob "Roblimo" Miller) was to view the source of the page. Look for mms or just http.

Using that, the MP3 stream for wduv is at: http://provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/WDUVFM.pls

[dibl]

Re: Radio Tray

One tip I got years ago (Rob "Roblimo" Miller) was to view the source of the page. Look for mms or just http.

That is a great tip -- I should have thought of it -- THANKS!


On the ones that pop open Adobe Flashplayer, we're probably just stuck with the browser interface.

[spottedhog]

Re: Radio Tray

arochester beat me to posting...

What I am finding is that one can get the streaming URL if you can find a .m3u or .pls file and open them in Kate, etc.

Here are 4 big lists of streaming radio:
http://dir.xiph.org/index.php
http://vtuner.com/setupapp/guide/asp.../startpage.asp
http://www.shoutcast.com/
http://www.radiorow.com/

[SteveRiley]

Re: Radio Tray

Kaffeine does a fine job on radio streams too, FYI.

Out of curiosity...do you use Kaffeine with Xine or GStreamer backend? I see that Kaffeine has a dependency on Xine, but IIRC that's being deprecated in favor of GStreamer...

[dibl]

Re: Radio Tray

Out of curiosity...do you use Kaffeine with Xine or GStreamer backend? I see that Kaffeine has a dependency on Xine, but IIRC that's being deprecated in favor of GStreamer...

Huh -- I never thought to wonder about that. I have both gstreamer and xine installed, but phonon has been set to gstreamer for a long time. I don't see a setting in Kaffeine to change the backend -- if it depends on xine then it must be using xine.

@spottedhog, thanks for those lists.

[SteveRiley]

Re: Radio Tray

Huh -- I never thought to wonder about that. I have both gstreamer and xine installed, but phonon has been set to gstreamer for a long time. I don't see a setting in Kaffeine to change the backend -- if it depends on xine then it must be using xine.

Kaffeine claims to work with other backends. So it could be that it's simply following whatever Phonon is set to. It's a bit irksome that the package includes a hard dependency for one particular backend.

[dibl]

Re: Radio Tray

I just installed a new Debian/KDE system, and out of curiosity checked Kaffeine with only the gstreamer backend -- it works great with no xine installed. So I would say the xine dependency is not quite true.

[SteveRiley]

Re: Radio Tray

Sounds like it's a packaging thing, then, that's different between Kubuntu and Debian/KDE. Kubuntu wants to install Xine even if (as on my system) GStreamer is already installed:

$ sudo apt-get -s install kaffeine
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree    
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
 libxine1 libxine1-bin libxine1-console libxine1-misc-plugins libxine1-x
Suggested packages:
 libxine1-ffmpeg gxine xine-ui libxine1-doc libxine-doc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
 kaffeine libxine1 libxine1-bin libxine1-console libxine1-misc-plugins libxine1-x

[dibl]

Re: Radio Tray

Well ... color me semi-stupid.

In systemsettings > multimedia, there is no xine backend showing. That was the basis of my claim of "no xine here". However

root@aptosidbox:/home/don# apt-cache depends kaffeine
kaffeine
 Depends: kdebase-runtime
 Depends: libc6
 Depends: libgcc1
 Depends: libkdecore5
 Depends: libkdeui5
 Depends: libkfile4
 Depends: libkio5
 Depends: libqt4-dbus
 Depends: libqt4-network
 Depends: libqt4-sql
 Depends: libqt4-svg
 Depends: libqt4-xml
 Depends: libqtcore4                                                
 Depends: libqtgui4                                                
 Depends: libsolid4                                                
 Depends: libstdc++6                                                
 Depends: libx11-6                                                 
 Depends: libxine1                                                 
 Depends: libxss1                                                 
 Depends: libxine1-ffmpeg                                             
 Depends: libxine1-x                                                
 Depends: libqt4-sql-sqlite                                            
 Suggests: <libdvdcss2>

So I guess some of xine is installed.

[SteveRiley]

Re: Radio Tray

Probably because to get Xine to show up as a Phonon backend you need yet another package, phonon-backend-xine:

$ apt-cache search xine backend
kaffeine - versatile media player for KDE
deejayd - Network controllable media player daemon
deejayd-xine - Deejayd XINE backend
phonon-backend-xine - Phonon Xine 1.1.x backend
phonon-backend-xine-dbg - Phonon Xine backend debugging symbols
python-pyxine - interface to the xine media player for Python
python-pyxine-dbg - interface to the xine media player for Python (debug extension)
subtitlecomposer - Subtitles editor for KDE
kde-config-phonon-xine - advanced Phonon Xine configuration

Linux audio is an untamed beast!

[Guest]

after moving from ubuntu 10 to ubuntu 12, i discovered that rhythmbox would no longer play my internet radio stations. thus began the movement to kubuntu. while i could get amarok to eventually play, i got more baggage than i could tolerate. i listen to ambient music. do i need lyrics? i am quite pleased with the simplicity and small footprint of radio tray. i suspect that eventually the browser will be the only music outlet, but i'm good for a while.

now, if i can get a temperature/weather icon to work (another loss with ubuntu 12).