Summary
radio-active gets our strong recommendation. If you like terminal apps and listening to radio stations, you’ll love radio-active. It’s heads and shoulders above PyRadio and curseradio.
Many internet radio players struggle with the BBC HD radio streams. How a tool copes with these streams is a good bellwether for the program’s capabilities. We’re really happy that radio-active handles them with aplomb. And radio-active works well with all the streams we’ve explored.
Memory usage is fairly frugal. There’s a good range of features although there’s lots of things we’d like added such as bitrate information on streams, and help in finding trending and popular stations.
radio-active doesn’t have that many GitHub stars which is frankly a disgrace. Never be put off trying a project just because it doesn’t have thousands or tens of thousands of stars.
Website: github.com/deep5050/radio-active
Support:
Developer: Dipankar Pal
License: MIT License
radio-active is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Memory Usage
Page 4 – Summary
Related Software
| Terminal-Based Internet Radio Apps | |
|---|---|
| PyRadio | Cross-platform curses based with support for Radio Browser |
| radio-active | Command-line tool to listen to more than 30,000 radio stations |
| SonicRadio | Stylish TUI radio player |
| RadioGoGo | Surf global radio waves |
| tera | Play radio stations, CRUD your favorite lists, and explore stations |
| radion | TUI client written in Bash |
| cTune | ncurses tool with good search functionality |
| rig.fm | Fast, focused, keyboard-friendly, and free of clutter |
| Radio Recorder | Internet radio player and recorder |
| PMRP-NG | Ground-up rewrite of PMRP |
| goradion | TUI internet radio player that uses mpv |
| Radiotrope | AI agent-enabled internet radio player |
| Radioboat | Terminal web radio client, built with simplicity in mind |
| PMRP | Poor Man's Radio Player |
| radio-cli | Simple radio CLI written in Rust |
| TuneIn CLI | Basic internet radio with TuneIn Radio and Radio Browser as providers |
| tmuzika | Music player and internet radio player |
| Curseradio | Very simple application for navigating and playing radio streams |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |
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?