Last Updated on August 11, 2021
Why do I love internet radio? There’s no sign-up or subscription charges. There’s a huge range of stations available from around the world. If you like classical music, pop music, folk music, news, talk radio, and much more, internet radio has something for everyone wherever you live (providing you have a net connection).
I hope you’re enjoying my reviews of internet radio players. These reviews examined odio, Shortwave, Radiotray-NG, PyRadio, StreamTuner2, and Curseradio. I’ve been dabbling with another internet radio player, which carries the moniker Goodvibes.
Goodvibes is billed as a lightweight internet radio player offering a simple way to access your favorite radio stations.
Goodvibes is written in C and builds with Meson. The core building blocks are provided by GLib, the HTTP segments are handled by LibSoup, the audio part is delegated to GStreamer, and the graphical user interface is written with GTK+.
Installation
There’s packages available for Debian and Ubuntu distributions. There’s a package in the Arch User Repository. And if you like cross-distribution packages, there’s also a Flatpak available.
But compiling the source code is very straightforward. Simply type the following commands at a shell.
$ git clone https://gitlab.com/goodvibes/goodvibes.git
$ cd goodvibes
$ meson build
$ ninja -C build
$ sudo ninja -C build install
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Summary
GOODVIBES is the best webradio player that I ever have used.
It’s fast and stable and I never experienced any hickups while streaming radio stations from around the world.
Part of the magic: It’s a no-frills application. In order to add a new station in GOODVIBES, you need to provide the stream-URL of that station. These URLs however are not always easy to find. Usually, the radio stations have links in several formats somewhere on their websites. Other streaming-URLs can be found in listings, forums or chatrooms. GOODVIBES, when freshly installed, doesn’t contain any URLs. But that’s ok with me.
Thanks for sharing your views Frank. Very interesting.
We recently published a roundup of internet radio software at https://www.linuxlinks.com/best-free-internet-radio-software/
The winner was Shortwave. And Tauon Music Box was pretty close to top spot given its recent improvements in the radio area. It’s always horses for courses though!
Goodvibes is pretty good, particularly if you’re running a somewhat older computer or a Raspberry Pi. I was a longtime user of the (now unsupported) “RadioTray”. It was much better in that you could create menus and sub-menus in your station database, while with Goodvibes everything is in one big list.
If your station list is maybe at most 30-40 stations, I’d recommend Goodvibes.
On the other hand, Goodvibes is much better at not “dropping” streams than RadioTray.
“Shortwave” (formerly “Gradio”) pulls its station info from the “Community Radio Browser” database, which is crowdsourced. You will want to run it on a slightly better computer instead of an older “clunker”.
Pulling station stream URL’s is not really that hard 90% of the time. I can figure most of them out in a matter of minutes. You can grab them in Firefox by just going to “Tools/WebDeveloper/Network” and just play the stream on the website. It’s similar in Chrome/Chromium. You get the hang of it after awhile. Occasionally, you need to do a “view source” on the website to find the stream URL. Most radio stations “outsource” their streaming to one of half a dozen companies and so you get used to the stream URL “patterns”.
There are a lot of radio station directories which provide you with streaming URLs.