Thursday, October 15, 2009
Internet Radio with Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is the standard music player application for the Gnome desktop environment that’s installed by default on RHEL 5 and other Linux distros.
While its primary purpose is to play back lists of songs stored on disk, Rhythmbox also allows you to bookmark podcasts and live stream links for Internet radio stations.
Most Internet media streams require either Microsoft (Windows Media Player) or Apple (iTunes) software and are therefore inaccessible to those of us who use Linux as our primary desktop. Many, like C-SPAN, only allow you to access content through a web-based player using any installed Media Player, iTunes or Real Player codecs.
After some experimentation, I was able to add a few new Internet radio stations to those that come preconfigured. Previous to this I had installed some extra gstreamer plugins that provide both the Totem movie player and Rhythmbox with additional media support (gstreamer-plugins-ugly and gstreamer-plugins-bad). Here are a few of the stations I added to the list:
WCPE is a local classical station here in the NC Triangle.
WUNC is our own local NPR (National Public Radio) station.
Air America Radio provides a welcome alternative to the majority of talk radio content.
BBC World Service provides 24 hour news/talk to the world.
Whilst looking for the BBC feed link, I stumbled upon this page, that provides URLs for both global and local stations in the BBC network.
Three Counties Radio and BBC Essex cover areas in the United Kingdom where some of my colleagues live and work, so listening in to them lets me get an idea of what’s going on there.
