Chill Electronica Streams

Description

This project is a directory of chill electronica streaming radio stations. If you like DEF CON radio or Groove Salad on Soma.fm, this is for you.

This project provides three things:

1. A directory of streaming radio station URLs
2. A Python API for accessing that directory
3. A command-line utility to present a menu and launch VLC with a selected URL

Installation

Requirements

• OS:
  • Probably most modern (reasonable) Linux distros, but late Ubuntu releases are known to work
  • Late macOS versions (tested on macOS 11.4 with up-to-date homebrew installed)
  • Windows probably won't work (but might be easily made to, let me know)
• Python >= 3.8 (3.9 preferred)
• VLC, with the vlc command line utility on your $PATH (the homebrew VLC cask on macOS sets this up for you)
  • Alternatively you may set VLC_PATH to point to a vlc executable:
  • e.g. export VLC_PATH=~/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC

Note: VLC has a bug on Apple Silicon and ncurses is broken. Workarounds:

• Recommended: create a symlink inside ~/.terminfo:

% mkdir ~/.terminfo
% # if TERM=xterm-256color:
% ln -s /usr/share/terminfo/78 ~/.terminfo/x
% # if TERM=screen-256color:
% ln -s /usr/share/terminfo/73 ~/.terminfo/s

• Install the x86-64 version
• Run with --gui, disabling ncurses

Installation, but for real this time

You can install directly from PyPI:

pip3 install --user Chill-Streams

CLI utility: vlc-radio

The vlc-radio utility starts up VLC Media Player playing one of the stations in the directory.

It has a few modes of operation:

• VLC running in text (ncurses) mode or GUI mode
• An interactive menu of stations to select from
• Direct play by station number
• Direct play by station name
• If a partial station name is provided and the match is ambiguous, a reduced menu is presented
• First match: if the match is ambiguous, directly play the first option

CLI Options

usage: vlc-radio [-h] [-f] [--gui] [--write-shell-script] [--version]
                 [station]

Chill Streams: Chill electronica streaming [version 0.1.1.dev0]

positional arguments:
  station               Index or (partial) name of station to play

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -f, --first-match     Choose first partial station name match
  --gui                 Disable ncurses interface, run VLC in GUI mode
  --write-shell-script  Write a shell script that sets up environment and
                        executes vlc-radio
  --version             Print version string and exit

If you just run 'vlc-radio', you get a selection menu of what station to play:

But, if you already know what station you want, you can ask for it directly:

If you know the name or partial name of a station, you can ask for it. If the match isn't ambiguous, vlc will play the station directly. If it is ambiguous, you'll get a reduced selection list:

Note that case and whitespace is ignored when asking for a station, so "DEF CON" and "defcon" are equivalent.

If you just want the first match (e.g., "groove salad" not "groove salad classic"), use the -f or --first-match option:

Bootstrap Script

You can use the --write-shell-script option to write a shell script that will boostrap vlc-radio for use in minimal environments. This is useful, for example, to create a dedicated terminal profile that just runs vlc-radio with specific station. Since no shell gets initialized, $PATH may not be set, and the location of VLC may not be known.

Below is such a profile in iTerm2:

Credit

Thanks to nick3499 for the original project this is forked from, and for curating a comprehensive directory of shoutcast stations.