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.
Radio is billed as a simple radio with a clear and concise interface. It’s written in Vala and published under an open source license.
We tested the software using the project’s Flatpak. That’s an open source containerized package format similar to Snap. While Snap relies on a central repository for software, Flatpak can be installed from different sources. The primary source is Flathub.
In Operation
Here’s an image of Radio in action.
From left to right, the icons in the title bar let you add a station to your favorites list, show your favorites, search for stations, play/stop, start/stop recording, and the hamburger action brings up a menu that let you set preferences.
In the image below, we’ve clicked the search icon, and entered the term bbc.
The software retrieves the station list from the website radio-browser.info, a community driven resource with the aim of collecting as many internet radio and TV stations.
While we know that BBC Radio 3 HD is the stream with the highest bitrate for this radio station, we’d like to access stream information as there are many duplicate stations in the radio-browser database, some offering higher quality streams than others.
Summary
Radio is a neat little app. It’s definitely not going to set the world on fire. But if you just want a basic app to listen to internet radio, it’s probably all you need.
The wonderful ps_mem utility reports that memory usage is around 150MB.
Recording stations is a bit limited. The recordings are saved to a folder .var/app/io.github.alexkdeveloper.radio/data/recordings in MP3 format.
There’s the option to play the last station at startup, show your favorite stations after launch, as well as the option to not load stations at startup.
Website: github.com/alexkdeveloper/radio
Support:
Developer: Alex Kryuchkov
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Radio is written in Vala. Learn Vala with our recommended free books and free tutorials.