Melody – music player written in Vala

Last Updated on September 3, 2020

Internet Radio

Melody plays internet radio streams. It’s up against some stiff competition in this field, with some excellent dedicated internet radio available like odio and Shortwave, although the former isn’t open source software (a free download though).

Both odio and Shortwave offer easy access to the radio-browser.info community database of stations. A huge compilation of 20,000 stations. It’s a boon if you enjoy dipping into undiscovered stations, as you don’t need to manually enter the stations.

Whereas with Melody, you have to manually add stations. In the image below I’ve manually added 18 stations. A bit of a chore to say the least. If you want to have dozens and dozens of stations, expect to expend effort in manually finding and adding the URLs for each stream.

Naturally, once you’ve got your favorite stations added, you don’t have to repeat the exercise. But without easy access to the radio-browser.info database, it’s harder to discover new stations to enjoy.

Changing radio streams works very efficiently, with the new stream starting up immediately.  I didn’t experience any crashes or glitches. On the downside, aesthetically, there’s little to cheer. The display of the radio stations is frankly boring and mundane. There’s no station logos. All very utilitarian.

Right click on a station lets you edit the station name and/or URL. And you can delete stations here.

Next page: Page 4 – Memory Usage

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Internet Radio
Page 4 – Memory Usage
Page 5 – Summary