Webradio in the command line
Since I discovered and learn to use emacs, I’m constantly looking for ways to work faster with my computer. One of the things that bothered me was the preparations I had to do when I switched-on my computer for writing. It is an old computer and hibernation under Linux doesn’t work, so once a day I have to wait for my Ubuntu system to boot up, turn on some radio music and fire up emacs.
I like listening to radio music lately, but opening the browser just for that is an overkill. Sometimes I have fifteen minutes to myself and all I want to do is write. Fire up a browser and it seems like forever to get to your homepage!
The solution was simple. I installed mpg123, a command-line audio player which can handle radio streams:
sudo apt-get install mpg123 (for Debian systems)
Then I grabbed the URL’s of my favorite radio stations and created some aliases into my ~/.bashrc:
alias ert=‘mpg123 http://radiostreaming.ert.gr/ert-deftero’
That’s it! Now I open up just my terminal and by typing my alias command the radio starts playing!
The trickier part was to find the URL’s of some radio stations. Some sites had them hidden behind embedded web-players giving me a hard time copying the statin’s URL. For some of those cases, I found a workaround (works sometimes): If you right click the web-player’s play button and select inspect element from Firefox, you can search inside the page’s code for the word .mp3 and maybe you’ll get lucky and get the hidden radio stream address!
Extra tip: mp3123 is so fantastic that you can use it to play randomly your mp3 collection. I use the following command:
mpg123 -z ~/Music/*/*/*
Just change the directory name from /home/Music/ to your own and press ‘h’ to see the available control commands while listening to your first randomly selected track!