Shortwave Internet Radio Player For Linux Has Its First Beta Release
Shortwave, the successor of Gradio, had it first beta release over the weekend. This is a GTK Internet radio player written in Rust, which uses radio-browser.info as its radio stations database.
Background: The Gradio developer wanted to rewrite Gradio using Rust, but later started a completely new project called Shortwave. There will be no major Gradio releases, but don't worry as Shortwave will include all important Gradio features and more.
Using Shortwave you can search for Internet radio stations, listen to them, automatically record songs, and even stream to Google Cast-enabled (Chromecast) devices.
Its interface has two tabs, one called Discovery, where you'll find popular and trending Internet radio stations, and a search tab where you can search for your favorite Internet radio station, genres, and so on. Clicking on a radio station shows the station description, language, tags, codecs used and homepage.
What's more, the Shortwave interface adapts to all screen sizes thanks to libhandy:
For its radio stations database, Shortwave uses radio-browser.info, which includes more than 25,000 radio stations. Due to vandalism, editing radio stations is not currently available on radio-browser.info, but you can add new stations. It's worth noting that you can't add radio stations directly into Shortwave.
Basic features already work in Shortwave, including radio stations discovery and search, the ability to save songs, and more.
You might also like: How To Create Your Own Internet Radio Station Using Icecast And Mixxx Running On Ubuntu/Debian Or Fedora
There's a reason Shortwave is currently in beta though - you might encounter some bugs, and some features are missing. For example the Shortwave Gitlab project page mentions that the application is not yet translatable, and some features have not yet been implemented, like UI selection mode, the ability to vote stations, and a GNOME Shell search provider. Also, streaming to Google Cast enabled devices is currently considered experimental.
A quick note on how radio recording works, since this is not immediately obvious -- Shortwave automatically records the radio you're playing in the background, automatically detecting the songs based on stream metadata (so this doesn't work for all radio stations). It then shows a list of songs in the sidebar, allowing you to save those songs to your computer for later use.
Install Shortwave Internet radio player on Linux
Shortwave is available in the Flathub beta repository so to install it on Linux (no matter the Linux distribution you're using), setup Flatpak if you haven't already, then use this command to install it:
flatpak install https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave.flatpakrefShortwave is also available on the Arch User Repository.
For building Shortwave from source, check out this page.
