NCurses Internet Radio Player
Since moving house last year, I’ve found myself unable to receive Saorview (Irish DVB-T) using an indoor aerial (my new house is about 10km further from the transmitter). This was previously my primary way of receiving the RTÉ Radio stations when working on my desktop. I have a high gain wideband antenna in the attic which works great, but with no neat way to get a cable to my desktop, this is unfortunately not an option..
I had a look around for terminal-based internet radio players but could find none packaged within Debian, which I found a bit surprising. I came across pyradio, but I found it a bit clunky. Nevertheless, it is still an improvement on RTÉ’s horrible Flash-based web player. I figured I could do better, and remembered VLC’s nifty NCurses interface; which is ideal for my requirements.
I’ve collated the IceCast m3u streams from RTÉ and other Irish stations into a XSPF playlist and placed it on Github. By opening this playlist within VLC, we get a pretty clean terminal interface for playing my radio stations:
vlc -I ncurses --no-color /path/to/radio_playlist.xspf
