Radio Listening Software

Radio Listening Software:

There are a number of Radio devices, in particular those TV tuner devices which also contain a radio receiver/tuner, for which V4L directly supports. The following list of software applications allow one to control a radio tuner.

Radio Applications

Gnomeradio and kradio, the most fully featured applications, are not yet available in all distributions and need to be compiled first. Some of the older applications are mature and readily available, but no longer actively developed.

• fftv [1]
• fmtools
• gkrellm-radio -- minimalistic gkrellm plugin to control radio tuners
• gnomeradio -- for Gnome, capable of recording
• gnome-radio -- Listen to FM radio over the air using PCI cards or USB devices with FM tuners built in
• GNU Radio -- the GNU software radio, testing phase; cf. wiki
• gradio -- in Debian, but not currently active
• ivtv-radio [2] -- part of the ivtv-utils package
• KRadio for KDE
• MPlayer -- media player for Linux. See link for radio usage information
• radio -- a n-curses-based radio application (part of the xawtv package)
• radioshark -- application to control the griffin radioshark
• XDRadio --- XDialog wrapper for radio listening
• xfce4-radio-plugin -- plugin for the Xfce panel
• xmms-fmradio -- plugin for XMMS, last version autumn 2004, Debian and Red Hat packages

Also See

• For devices capable of receiving RDS information, see the associated userspace applications.
• dvbradio (part of the v4 xawtv package) as an example of a specific application for listening to radio streams embedded within dvb transport streams

User experiences

If you're a user, post your installation and user experiences here!

gnomeradio

Clearly a more sophisticated application. There's only a debian package for i386, so I'll need to build from the tarball. Since I'm mainly interested in remote recording, I'll try fmtools and radio first.

gradio

I tried gradio on Debian amd64, as it's available; it's very basic. If you don't have the card on /dev/radio, start with

gradio -d /dev/radio2

No recording capability, stable gui, minimal functionality -- tuner and volume. I had to hand-edit the .gradiorc configuration file to get station presets; I may have missed some way of doing this through the gui.

xfce4-radio-plugin

XFCE changed over from the "libxfcegui4" lib to "libxfce4ui," and somebody with XFCE fixed & recompiled the panel plugins except for this and a couple of others, but didn't specify what they had to do. You can't compile and use the plugin out-of-the-box on the version of XFCE Panel used now without making some changes. Here's what I did:

1. Install libxfce4ui-1 package 2. Download the xfce4-radio-plugin source and extract the files 3. Do a "find & replace" on the files to replace all references to the old "libxfcegui4-1.0" to "libxfce4ui-1" 4. Modify the following lines in xfce4-radio.c:

xfce_exec(data->startup_command, FALSE, FALSE, NULL) to xfce_spawn_command_line_on_screen(NULL,data->startup_command, FALSE, FALSE, NULL)

AND:

xfce_exec(data->shutdown_command, FALSE, FALSE, NULL); xfce_spawn_command_line_on_screen(NULL,data->shutdown_command, FALSE, FALSE, NULL)

(I think you need to add the extra "NULL" in the parameters sent to the function, at least from what I could find.)

5. If you have changed everything to what it should be and have the right libs installed, you should able to run configure, and then make. You have to run make like this: make "LDFLAGS=-lm" otherwise, you will end up with "DSO not found on command line." 6. Do make install, then symlink /usr/local/share/xfce4/panel-plugins/radio.desktop to /usr/share/xfce4/panel-plugins/radio.desktop

Once this is done I was able to add the plugin to the Panel. Unfortunately, I cannot actually do a full function test on this as I found out later the FM tuner in my TV card isn't recognized by the driver. It is possible this won't work as I don't know anything about those function calls or if there is something else missing in the new lib that I do not know about.