Home / ubuntu / Questions / 940652
In Process
CatMan
Asked: 2017-07-29 04:41:38 +0800 CST

One-Panel-Button Web Radio (on/off) fpr xfce. How-to?

  • 772

After looking at about some 50 posts about web radios I think my issue had not been asked yet.

Do you still know those shabby old transistor radios playing in some corner or window sill in offices or workshops? Their tuning wheels are so bad that nobody ever touches them again once a station had been tuned. Also the volume knob is cracking horribly, so they are plugged in in the mornings and unplugged by the last one leaving the office. That's exactly what I want.

Ideally, this would be a fixed On/Off Icon somewhere in the Panel bar. No window at all. Press it once and the configured web radio stream starts playing. Press again it stops. The radio station is defined by the http address of an m3u file for the stream.

I did not find a app that works like that. I hope I just overlooked the one that exactly fits what I want and you guys can point me to the right one.

Best I found so far was gnome mplayer, but I am not really happy with it.

Its a normal appication. It reduces to a small icon in the panel bar which is good. On/Off is, open the Icon then press Play/Stop - which would be ok. Not OK is that I can't make it to just play the last stream. Every time it starts I need to open File/Open Location and copy&paste the http address of the m3u file from a text file on the drive. It would be OK for me when there is a way to autostart it with the right stream automatically loaded but not playing. I had tried to put the stream address into a file and used "Open Recent". It say "start playing" but then stops. This is how the file looked like. 

 #EXTM3U
 #EXTINF:-1, Web Radio
 http://some-webradioaddress.com/streamfile.m3u

So Is there a tool that already does what I want? Is there a way to make mplayer behave like I need? If no, how to achieve that by other means using command line apps and scripts or whatever?

Thanks für your creative input, CatMan

xfce

1 Answers

  1. I should have waited a bit longer, because just after posting, I accidently found this german page about a tool that exactly matches my needs.

    The Tool is called radiotray. It opens as icon in next to network and volume icons. When it is started it remembers the last played station. Left click gives you a context menu with the Start/Stop button (). Perfect. You can set up stations in a tree by dialog. I just deleted all and added my only station path as http://stationaddress.com/PathTo3MuFile.m3u. Now its very compact and super easy to use.

    There is a cool build-in plugin you can select in a dialog: sleep timer. It defaults to 15min. In the config file I set it to 2hrs, in case I forget to switch it off.

    Installation 

    sudo apt-get install radiotray python-xdg

    The config files are in:

    ~/.local/share/radiotray

    For those who can understand a bit of German there are some more information and images: https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Radio_Tray/

    Hope some may find it useful.

    CatMan

    • 1