Internet radio (also known as web radio, net radio, streaming radio, and online radio) is a digital audio service transmitted via the Internet.
Why do we like internet radio? There are 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). Internet radio offers every format that is available on traditional broadcast radio stations.
Before talking about kew’s new functionality, I’m going to digress a bit. I’d been hoping that internet radio would have been added to fooyin by now. fooyin is a rather wonderful music player. It’s a foobar2000 clone. The project’s ROADMAP has plans for internet radio support. Sadly fooyin’s development has slowed to a glacial pace in the past 6 months, with only a few commits made. The developer was first going to add album artwork downloading/saving before embarking on adding internet radio, but the release never saw the light of day. That’s one of the issues where an open source project is down to a single developer; work and life commitments often get in the way of a release.
Let’s get back on topic. I’ve written a few articles about kew, a music player sporting gapless playback, 24-bit/192khz audio, and MPRIS support. In many ways, it’s up there with the likes of musikcube and tap as the finest terminal-based music player. kew’s recent development has focused on improving the stability of the program, but the program’s latest release has added internet radio and mouse support.
In action
Start kew and hit F6 to access internet radio support. Supply a search term and you’re presented with a list of matches from the program’s streams database.
Playback is good. Listening for a few days I didn’t experience any interruptions.
But there’s an elephant in the room. I’m a big fan of classical music. While I can listen to the likes of Classic FM, I’m also a listener to BBC Radio 3. Sadly support for BBC streams is extremely limited, as shown in the search term below.
Why are so many BBC stations missing? That’s because kew currently only supports MP3 streams. And there are many other broadcasters who don’t limit themselves to MP3 streams.
Summary
kew makes a good start with implementing internet radio. But I really hope for some additional functionality being added including:
- A much bigger database. For example, Shortwave has over 50,000 radio stations available.
- Display the bitrate and codec for each stream. There are often duplicates in a search list so it would be helpful to know which stream has the highest bitrate without having to listen first.
- Our own library of stations (like a favourites list).
Linux is already endowed with excellent internet radio support explored in our GUI internet radio apps roundup and terminal-based internet radio apps roundup.
Website: github.com/ravachol/kew
Support:
Developer: Ravachol
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
kew is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.