Tuner

Tuner – radio station player

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’s no sign-up or subscription charges. There’s 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.

Tuner is billed as a minimalist radio station player. This program saw its first release in June 2020. The open source program is written in Vala. It offers access to a huge range of stations as it taps into the radio-browser.info catalog, a community driven project with an open API which collates internet radio and TV stations.

We’ve previously covered a fair number of dedicated internet radio streamers for Linux. To date, our favorite open source app is Shortwave, a Rust based tool that also uses the radio-browser.info community database.

Installation

Tuner is designed for elementary OS, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu LTS. Installation on elementary OS is trivial. Just open up AppCenter and select the Audio section. Click on Tuner to install which is listed in the curated section.

What if you are running a different distro to elementary OS? We compiled Tuner with no problems under Ubuntu. You first need to install the dependencies. In Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros these are installed with the commands:

$ sudo apt install git valac meson
$ sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev libgee-0.8-dev libgranite-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev libsoup2.4-dev libjson-glib-dev libgeoclue-2-dev libgeocode-glib-dev

As Tuner is an open source project, we can clone its repository, compile and install the software. Issue the following commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/louis77/tuner.git
$ cd tuner
$ meson build && cd build
$ meson configure -Dprefix=/usr
$ sudo ninja install

There are packages available for MX Linux and Arch (the latter from the Arch User Repository). There’s also a Flatpak available. Getting the software running on the majority of Linux distros should be easy.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Summary

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14 Comments
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Cuppycake
Cuppycake
2 years ago

Are any TV stations included or do you have to add IPTV m3u list .. love the blog on the G2 by the way ,bought one myself ( i5-6500T) and very pleased with its performance running Linux mint ?

UUUnicorn
UUUnicorn
2 years ago

Tuner doesn’t show up in my Ubuntu Budgie launcher! (*SIGH!*)

Londoner
Londoner
2 years ago

You can change the station order and edit the favorites list by editing a json file. If you installed Tuner via Flatpak, it’s at ~/.var/app/com.github.louis77.tuner/data/com.github.louis77.tuner

Harry T
Harry T
2 years ago
Reply to  Londoner

Pretty lame you have to edit a json file to do something so obvious.

Vince C
Vince C
2 years ago

I never knew about Tuner. Thanks so much!

Jumping Jack
Jumping Jack
2 years ago

Tuner is actually very good. An undiscovered gem!

ARF
ARF
2 years ago

Tuner now shows codec and bitrate for each station.

wgparch
wgparch
10 months ago

I am glad I searched and discovered Tuner nice nice I prefer it over shortwave!

Mah
Mah
10 months ago

On Ubuntu 22.10, I had to install geocode-glib.git and do ‘sudo apt install gtk-doc-tools’ for that.

nekrub2
nekrub2
8 months ago

Wordeful tool. Just one question: Can you export your favorites and reimport them on an other device?

HaikoB
HaikoB
5 months ago

I have an error:
WARNING: CMake Toolchain: Failed to determine CMake compilers state
Run-time dependency geocode-glib-1.0 found: NO (tried pkgconfig and cmake)
what i have to do???
Thank you