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DATE: 2020-03-25
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
I've been feeling nostalgic for a holiday I took last year to New Mexico in the USA. We spent a lot of time listening to country radio stations and driving through the beautiful scenery. While I am confined to home I thought it would be nice to listen to those radio stations again, but I was finding it laborious to listen to the radio through my web browser.
Most internet radio streams have a URL, which can be scraped usually by looking at the HTML of the webpage, or rarely if the radio provider is feeling public spirited, in plain text on the streaming page. These URLs are mostly readable by VLC[1] if they are .mp3, .ogg, m3u, .pls and probably many more. The backend of VLC's streaming capabilities is an in-built plugin called Icecast, previously Shoutcast. I made a simple text file of these URLs along with the names of the stations:
1: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.en-GB.html
https://radiostationusa.fm/apii.php?url=https://stream.revma.ihrhls.com/zc1385,Big I 107.9 Albuquerque New Country http://bbcmedia.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcmedia_radio1_mf_p,BBC Radio 1 http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/nonuk/sbr_vlow/llnw/bbc_radio_fourlw.m3u8,BBC Radio 4 LW
Then I wrote a shell script which uses fzf[2] to neatly display the radio station names, then uses sed and grep to send the URL to the ncurses version of VLC, which on macOS at least is stored in /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I ncurses when VLC is installed using Homebrew.
2: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
#!/bin/sh
stations="$HOME/.radio.txt"
sel=$(sed 's/^.*,//' ${stations} | fzf)
url=$(grep "${sel}" ${stations} | sed 's/,.*$//')
vlc "${url}"
The BBC changed their radio streaming URLs which prompted me to also change how this script worked a bit. The radio streaming URLs are now stored in a .pls file, which makes it more compatible with other music players. I've included the full .pls file here because these URLs are hard to come by online:
playlist NumberOfEntries=10 Title1=BBC Radio 4 FM File1=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_radio_fourfm Title2=BBC Radio 4 LW - non UK File2=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_radio_fourlw_online_nonuk Title3=BBC Radio 6 File3=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_6music Title4=BBC Radio London File4=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_london Title5=BBC World Service File5=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_world_service Title6=WQXR File6=http://stream.wqxr.org/wqxr Title7=LBC File7=http://media-ice.musicradio.com:80/LBCNewsUK Title9=BBC Radio Scotland File9=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_radio_scotland_fm Title10=NTS File10=http://stream-relay-geo.ntslive.net/stream
The script looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/env sh
rfile=~/.radio.pls
station=$(grep '^Title' ${rfile} | sed 's/^Title\([0-9]\+\)=\(.*\)/\1 - \2/' | fzf | sed 's/\(^[0-9]\+\).*/\1/')
url=$(grep "File${station}=" $rfile | sed 's/.*=//')
/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I rc --no-color $url
I was getting annoyed having to quit out of FZF and relaunch the script every time I wanted to change the radio station, so I re-wrote it to use mpv, using the --bind flag in fzf to run a never-ending loop. I tried to do similar using VLC, but it kept quitting back to FZF immediately, rather than keeping VLC open until I wanted to quit.
#!/usr/bin/env sh
rfile=~/.radio.pls
grep '^Title' ${rfile} |\
sed 's/^Title\([0-9]\+\)=\(.*\)/\1 - \2/' |\
fzf --bind="enter:execute;echo {} | sed 's/\(^[0-9]\+\).*/\1/' |
sed 's/\(.*\)/File\1=/' |
grep -f - ${rfile} |
sed 's/.*=//' |
mpv --playlist=- ;"