Last Updated on May 27, 2020
Summary
I really enjoy listening to radio stations with the great range of open source software.
If I could only install one streaming radio player, I’d plump for Yarock. But for general music listening with occasional internet radio, Tauon Music Box is a compelling choice.
None of the programs featured in this blog suffer in any way from the limited resources available from the RPI4. And in fact the RPI4 makes an ideal radio player given that it’s extremely frugal with power consumption and silent running. Nothing’s worse than listening to the whirr of fans when you’re trying to enjoy a play, an opera, or even the latest super group of the day (is that The Aces – Ed)?
The scourge of PulseAudio only reared its ugly head with one of the programs (Radiotray-NG).
There’s other internet radio software available. I’ll mention a few.
I successfully compiled Olivia (after first installing Raspbian’s libqt5webkit5-dev package), cloning the repository, and compiling the source code. But the program refused to play internet streams, yielding no debug information. But even the YouTube functionality seems really buggy, at least on the RPI4.
I wasn’t able to compile Shortwave as it requires GTK 3.24.11, but Raspbian only has 3.24.5, and I think it’ll be non-trivial to upgrade GTK. Have you got Shortwave running on the RPI4?
Another notable internet radio player software is odio. While it’s a free download the current version isn’t published under an open source license. As the developer doesn’t provide ARM packages, it’s not possible to get this program up-and-running on the RPI4. There’s a 2.0 version in development but the developer appears to have backtracked on his promise to open source the code.
There’s other open source software. It’s impossible to be exhaustive. It’s Linux after all. But if you can find a better internet radio player than Yarock, do share!
And remember, don’t install the Raspbian package for RadioTray. It’s discontinued software.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – Tauon Music Box
Page 3 – Radiotray-NG
Page 4 – PyRadio
Page 5 – StreamTuner2
Page 6 – Curseradio
Page 7 – Goodvibes
Page 8 – Sayonara Player
Page 9 – Cantata
Page 10 – Yarock
Page 11 – Summary
Read all my blog posts about the RPI4.
| Raspberry Pi 4 Blog | |
|---|---|
| Week 36 | Manage your personal collections on the RPI4 |
| Week 35 | Survey of terminal emulators |
| Week 34 | Search the desktop with the latest version of Recoll |
| Week 33 | Personal Information Managers on the RPI4 |
| Week 32 | Keep a diary with the RPI4 |
| Week 31 | Process complex mathematical functions, plot 2D and 3D graphs with calculators |
| Week 30 | Internet radio on this tiny computer. A detailed survey of open source software |
| Week 29 | Professionally manage your photo collection with digiKam |
| Week 28 | Typeset beautifully with LyX |
| Week 27 | Software that teaches young people how to learn basic computing skills and beyond |
| Week 26 | Firefox revisited - Raspbian now offers a real alternative to Chromium |
| Week 25 | Turn the Raspberry Pi 4 into a low power writing machine |
| Week 24 | Keep the kids learning and having fun |
| Week 23 | Lots of choices to view images |
| Week 22 | Listening to podcasts on the RPI4 |
| Week 21 | File management on the RPI4 |
| Week 20 | Open Broadcaster Software (OBS Studio) on the RPI4 |
| Week 19 | Keep up-to-date with these news aggregators |
| Week 18 | Web Browsers Again: Firefox |
| Week 17 | Retro gaming on the RPI4 |
| Week 16 | Screen capturing with the RPI4 |
| Week 15 | Emulate the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and the Atari ST on the RPI4 |
| Week 14 | Choose the right model of the RPI4 for your desktop needs |
| Week 13 | Using the RPI4 as a screencaster |
| Week 12 | Have fun reading comics on the RPI4 with YACReader, MComix, and more |
| Week 11 | Turn the RPI4 into a complete home theater |
| Week 10 | Watching locally stored video with VLC, OMXPlayer, and others |
| Week 9 | PDF viewing on the RPI4 |
| Week 8 | Access the RPI4 remotely running GUI apps |
| Week 7 | e-book tools are put under the microscope |
| Week 6 | The office suite is the archetypal business software. LibreOffice is tested |
| Week 5 | Managing your email box with the RPI4 |
| Week 4 | Web surfing on the RPI4 looking at Chromium, Vivaldi, Firefox, and Midori |
| Week 3 | Video streaming with Chromium & omxplayerGUI as well as streamlink |
| Week 2 | A survey of open source music players on the RPI4 including Tauon Music Box |
| Week 1 | An introduction to the world of the RPI4 looking at musikcube and PiPackages |
This blog is written on the RPI4.
I had to also perform the following before cmake would do its thing:
sudo apt install libqt5x11extras5-dev
sudo apt-get install qttools5-dev
sudo apt install libtag1-dev
I probably had these development packages already installed. One thing worth remembering is you don’t need to install packages one-by-one. For example with your commands, you can type:
$ sudo apt install libqt5x11extras5-dev qttools5-dev libtag1-dev
I also had to install the following packages to get this work:
sudo apt install qt5-default qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools qtmultimedia5-dev libqt5svg5-dev libqt5webkit5-dev