Streamtuner alternative

[julian67]

Streamtuner's ability to fetch shoutcast indexes and stream info broke for the nth time recently (if yours is working don't refresh!). I explored all the alternatives I could find in the Debian and debian-multimedia repos and didn't find anything useful to me. Finally I filed a bug against Debian's streamtuner which is something of a last resort in this case because streamtuner hasn't been maintained for a couple of years and is more likely to be dropped than fixed. But someone added a reply pointing to streamtuner2

streamtuner2 is an internet radio browser. It looks up the
categorized music stations from various directory services, like:


* SHOUTcast (works mostly)

* Xiph.org / icecast (basic function)

* live365 (standard)

* DMOZ/Google stations (ported from st1)

It is written in Python and therefore easy to extend. It mimics
streamtuner 1 in look
and feel, but is an independent rewrite.
program window screenshot

It's still in a very early development state. It is neither
feature-complete nor optimized for speed. It will always consume more
memory than the original C implementation.

Planned features for streamtuner2 include: loading of favicons for
each music station. Support for st1 plugins which were written in
Python as well, dynamic "script" plugins which capture pure web stations.
Additionally a console-only mode is planned, because station lists can
thus be exported as JSON or YAML or other list formats.

It's very much alpha but configuring your preferred apps is fine and shoutcast and calling streamripper work perfectly.

[craigevil]

There is also tunapie.
Description: Lists audio and video streams from Shoutcast and Icecast
A GUI based program for displaying Shoutcast or Icecast video and radio
streams. It gives information about streams including bitrate, IP and current
number of listeners. Streams can then be played using an appropriate media
player, defined in preferences. Tunapie also allows streams to be recorded
using streamripper. Recordings can be set to start and stop at specified times.
Homepage: http://tunapie.sourceforge.net/

[julian67]

Tried it and don't like it. It only shows me a handful of the available shoutcast streams, not all of them, and secondly it fails to pass audio or video addresses to any except certain gui front ends, for instance it just spits errors if set up to use mplayer (that's mplayer not gmplayer) or mocp so it wasn't much use.

[nadir]

I just checked and got tunapie set to play music with alsaplayer-gtk. I know that it did work with audacious too (in the past). I also seem to remember that it worked with aqualung.

Good hint with streamtuner2.
Shoutcast was always borked, so i used only Xiph. Today i checked Shoutcast: hurray, it did work. Then i hit <reload> and ran into the problem you posted the bug-report about (i just wanted to check... )

My main problem with both, streamtuner and tunapie, is to find streams which i like. There are so much, but most of them seem to be crap: Something not too interruptive, like shopping-music... just boring.
If someone has got some tips on that i am all ears. Like a short list of streams which are worth a try
( i mainly like hardcore/crossover, either straight forward or experimental like Primus and so, but not that Seattle-crap for schoolgirls; Jazz like in "bitches brew" or "jazz from hell" and a wee bit of "classic" like Schönberg/Berg/Webern, Cage and such stuff. I am open to all kind of music... needs to sound interesting somehow. If i want to sleep i go to bed).

[julian67]

tunapie just doesn't have enough streams, only a fraction of what you get with streamtuner2 or used to get with streamtuner. Best advice is to try streamtuner2 or try to browse the astonishingly awful, clunky, confusing mess of a website at http://www.shoutcast.com/ See how many times you have to click "show more" before you want to scream, and if/when you do find something interesting click on it and find a bad link such as http://http://www.whatever.com and get used to manually typing the correct address into a different tab. OK I'm an ingrate but maybe the website should be renamed to http://www.shitcast.com.

As for clients I don't want a graphical playback client at all. I already have mocp running at all times on a tilda hotkey combo so all I need is for the browsing client to pass the address to it, which works fine with streamtuner and streamtuner2 but not at all with tunapie. Anything I like I end up aliasing in .bashrc for mplayer, such as

Code: Select all

alias radiobaobab="mplayer -v http://streaming.radionomy.com:8000/Radio-Baobab"

and if it's a station I might want to rip I also have

Code: Select all

alias radiobaobabrip="streamripper http://streaming.radionomy.com:8000/Radio-Baobab -r -d ~/temp/streamripper"

and if I want to listen while streamripper dumps the tracks

Code: Select all

alias riplisten="mplayer -v http://127.0.0.1:8000"

[nadir]

Oh!
Thats good. dpkg -i; open it, click on a station and i got good music (not amazing, but good, and with the very first click).
Cool. Thanks.

[julian67]

Oh!
Thats good. dpkg -i; open it, click on a station and i got good music (not amazing, but good, and with the very first click).
Cool. Thanks.

I found the deb not so great. Bookmarking failed to work, I think by trying to write some place I don't have permission, so I unpacked the tarball into ~/bin and use the py launcher instead (no need to install).

[nadir]

Ok.
Thanks again, that is sure a big step forwards. Me happy.

[anticapitalista]

I use streamtuner and xmms on antiX-Sid and theproblem I have now is only with shoutcast. Hardly streamtuner's fault.

[julian67]

I use streamtuner and xmms on antiX-Sid and theproblem I have now is only with shoutcast. Hardly streamtuner's fault.

The problem lies with the fact that the project was abandoned by the developer a couple of years ago so changes in shoutcast's web service always break the application. Originally the shoutcast IP address was hardcoded so even a simple change of shoutcast's IP address broke it. That got fixed but shoutcast do change things from time to time and each time streamtuner is broken until a user submits a patch to a distribution (nothing happens upstream). I also found that the google stations don't work and that enabling the live365 plugin can crash the application. It's unusual to see an unmaintained package survive so long. I expect it will disappear from the repos after squeeze, or maybe even by the time squeeze is released.

[handheldCar]

If someone has got some tips on that i am all ears.

I listen to a couple streams from local universities. You should see if any California universities have some streams that you like. Some of them might have a hardcore show that you could tune into every week.

[off220]

sorry for the necrobump, but are there any more alternatives since the last post? I have a player that just plays music(deadbeef) and I want an app that just plays streaming radio.

[edbarx]

mplayer?

[Tadeas]

vlc, mplayer, realplayer (if you don't mind proprietary and 32-bit only software)...

[nadir]

sorry for the necrobump, but are there any more alternatives since the last post? I have a player that just plays music(deadbeef) and I want an app that just plays streaming radio.

i did not ran into any more, besides the ones mentioned in this thread: streamtuner, streamtuner2, tuneapie.
lastfm (cli: shell-fm) and vagalume( cli: zomg , for librefm) are close to a stream (at least to someone like me, who only needs a bit of voice-noise in the background).

If you would say what is wrong with the ones mentioned in this thread, it would be easier to propose other ones.

[rijnsma]

It is not only with streamtuner (2) etc.
A lot of Linux-software has to be maintained much better.

And there has to be more interesting and usable applications.
I don't see much new software of late.

When I compare this to the 'handhelds'...

Very dangerous for Linux I suppose...?? I hope not.

[imnotrich]

Tunapie, Streamtuner, Streamtuner2 have so many bugs and outdated playlists on Squeeze I don't even bother anymore and there are SO many crashes and freezes I don't have the six weeks it would take to file bugs for all of them.

Right now I'm using Radiosure with WINE, but even that isn't perfect - can't play MP3 streams because it stutters every 5 seconds. But oggs and other audio file format streams work perfectly.

I haven't tried Screamer or Tapin with WINE but really...shouldn't there be native debian alternatives? I mean what's the point of having Streamtuner, Streamtuner2 or Tunapie in the repos if they just plain stink?

[bulletmark]

I play shoutcast streams all day every day using guayadeque which is superb.

[rijnsma]

Tunapie, Streamtuner, Streamtuner2 have so many bugs and outdated playlists on Squeeze I don't even bother anymore and there are SO many crashes and freezes I don't have the six weeks it would take to file bugs for all of them.

[..]

I mean what's the point of having Streamtuner, Streamtuner2 or Tunapie in the repos if they just plain stink?

This is not only the case with thís software.

There is a lot in de repositories, but not all software is top. Too much is in console-style and new, interesting goodrunning software is sparce.

Doesn't matter for me, I do have enough to play around with or to do things with. But I hope this will be better with all those handhelds with all those apps... Competition is 'on'.

And the channels?
There are always alternatives in packets of radio-channels: Delicast, Accu, 'Internetradio', indeed Shoutcast, Xiph.
And of course Grooveshark, Songza of what have you not?

[Jim937]

Wow thanks for filing the bug report Streamtuner2 is now working in Jessie!

I really like it and hope it is continued to be supported it is way better then using the websites such as Shoutcast.com to browse for music and it is very difficult to download the the radio links. I am now able to quickly browse, download all the channel links and add them to amarok. Amarok has the coolstreams but it is a very limited selection. I am currently using streamtuner2 on a very old 1ghz single processor computer whose sole purpose is a print server and background music.

As for a decent streamtuner alternative I wasn't able to find one. I find it very useful I don't know why there are not more applications for Internet radio browsing. It would be nice to have shoutcast Integrated into Amarok.