Radio Listening Software

Radio Listening Software:

There are a number of Radio devices, in particular those TV tuner devices which also contain a radio receiver/tuner, for which V4L directly supports. The following list of software applications allow one to control a radio tuner.

Radio Applications

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.

• fftv [1]
• fmtools also for the command-line (most distros)
  • cajun for making your own car or home audio system
  • DashPC for car radio and more from Linux Automotive
• gkrellm-radio -- minimalistic gkrellm plugin to control radio tuners
• gnomeradio -- for Gnome, capable of recording
• GNU Radio -- the GNU software radio, testing phase; cf. wiki
• gradio -- in Debian, but not currently active
• ivtv-radio [2] -- part of the ivtv-utils package
• KRadio for KDE
• MPlayer -- media player for Linux. See link for radio usage information
• radio -- a n-curses-based radio application (part of the xawtv package)
• radioshark -- application to control the griffin radioshark
• XDRadio --- XDialog wrapper for radio listening
• xfce4-radio-plugin -- plugin for the Xfce panel
• xmms-fmradio -- plugin for XMMS, last version autumn 2004, Debian and Red Hat packages

Also See

• For devices capable of receiving RDS information, see the associated userspace applications.

User experiences

If you're a user, post your installation and user experiences here!

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

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.

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.