Radio Listening Software
Radio applications
A number of v4l cards have a radio receiver/tuner.
The following applications control the tuner. Gnomeradio and kradio, the most fully featured applications, are not yet available in all distributions and need to be compiled first. Some of the older applications are mature and readily available, but no longer actively developed.
- radioshark -- application to control the griffin radioshark
- gnomeradio -- for Gnome, capable of recording
- kradio for KDE
- xmms-fmradio -- plugin for XMMS, last version autumn 2004, Debian and Red Hat packages
- gkrellm-radio -- minimalistic gkrellm plugin to control radio tuners
- gradio -- in Debian, but not currently active
- radio -- a curses-based radio application by Gerd Knorr, part of xawtv; see man page (most distros)
- radio script part of the MisterHouse project
- fmtools also for the command-line (most distros)
- gnuradio -- the GNU software radio, testing phase; cf. wiki
- xfce4-radio-plugin -- plugin for the Xfce panel
User experiences
If you're a user, post your installation and user experiences here!
gradio
I tried gradio on Debian amd64, as it's available; it's very basic. If you don't have the card on /dev/radio, start with
gradio -d /dev/radio2
No recording capability, stable gui, minimal functionality -- tuner and volume. I had to hand-edit the .gradiorc configuration file to get station presets; I may have missed some way of doing this through the gui.
gnomeradio
Clearly a more sophisticated application. There's only a debian package for i386, so I'll need to build from the tarball. Since I'm mainly interested in remote recording, I'll try fmtools and radio first.
fmtools
The package contains two binaries, fm and fmscan. To pick up all stations even with very weak reception, I issued,
$ fmscan -d /dev/radio2 fmscan -d /dev/radio3 -t 18 -i 0.1 Scanning range: 87.9 - 107.9 MHz (0.2 MHz increments)...
Nice and clean. I added an antenna, but still got weak reception. This is very useful for testing the radio and finding the stations; does it support directing the sound to a file? I try various combinations and end up with this to get 100% volume:
$ fm -d /dev/radio3 89.9 65535 Radio tuned to 89.88 MHz at 100.00% volume
Weird. I don't see a way to record; do I need to use sox? I don't know if I'm getting any sound, as I don't have speakers on this box.
Sox is what gnomeradio uses to record and it thankfully sends commands it uses to standard out.
for wav file:
sox -c2 -w -r32000 -tossdsp /dev/audio -r 44100 -c 2 -w -twav /tmp/foo.wav
for mp3 or ogg:
sox -c2 -w -r32000 -tossdsp /dev/audio -r 44100 -c 2 -w -twav /tmp/fm_fifo &
and
lame -S -h -b 128 /tmp/fm_fifo /tmp/foo.mp3
or
oggenc -Q -b 128 -o /tmp/foo.ogg /tmp/fm_fifo
radio
The radio package has a single binary, radio. The man page says it looks for the kradio configuration file ~/.kde/share/config/kradiorc. Failing that, radio tries ~/.radio. I issue,
radio -c /dev/radio3
and get a blue and red curses screen, very cool. Arrow keys increase and decrease frequency in 0.05 intervals. I'm clearly not picking up any signal to speak of. I figure I have a lower-level issue with the tuner.