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 are 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.
We’ve written a few reviews of command-line internet radio software including PyRadio and curseradio, both tools written in Python. radio-active is also written in Python and terminal-based. Let’s see how it fares.
Installation
One way to install radio-active is with pip. pip is a general-purpose package installer for both libraries and apps with no environment isolation. We generally prefer installing software with pipx. pipx is made specifically for application installation, as it adds isolation yet still makes the apps available in your shell: pipx creates an isolated environment for each application and its associated packages.
With Ubuntu, pipx is installed with the command:
$ sudo apt install pipx
We then use pipx to install radio-active with the command:
$ pipx install radio-active
This command installs the software to ~/.local/pipx/venvs/radio-active/bin and adds symlinks into ~/.local/bin
We can start the software with the command radio or radioactive.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Memory Usage
Page 4 – Summary
I have had little luck with radio apps, they seem to be static and crackle for me. I just use by web browser with streema or radiovolna.
There’s no luck involved with radio-active. Installation is very simple, and playback is without static or crackle.
Interesting.
The best source would actually be radio-browser where you can find and connect to streams to test them.
If they work in the browser, they’ll work in the application.
However, I’d go with pyradio – as it’s a far far more user friendly application than this radio.
The software uses that web directory for the stations so just search within the app.
I’ve never had any radio app have ‘static’ or ‘crackle’.
Quite enjoying this. Any way I can get Pulse to work with it for independent volume control?