Maybe today I’ve finally found an acceptable way to listen to web radio. Often I like to work with music, but after listening for the umpteenth time my favorite CD of Nirvana or Foo Fighters I want to switch to a bit of Web Radio, and here is my doubt “how?”

You can go to the website of the radio and probably find the link “listen live”, or equivalent that will start a nice flash player, not so easy right?

An acceptable alternative that I used to date has been Exaile. Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists. A lot of things right? This program is done well and i used it only as a radio player, a waste for me that i support the principle of “do one thing and do it well”, and so in my research i came across to radio tray

Radio Tray is an online radio streaming player that runs on a Linux system tray. Its goal is to have the minimum interface possible, making it very straightforward to use. Radio Tray is not a full featured music player, there are plenty of excellent music players already. However, there was a need for a simple application with minimal interface just to listen to online radios. And that’s the sole purpose of Radio Tray. Radio Tray is Free Software, licensed under the GPL.

That’s exactly what i was searching for.

Installation

Radio tray it’s available in ubuntu 10.10 so we just to have our package manager: aptitude install radiotray

Once installed i’ve found it in my menu under applcations -> multimedia (xubuntu)

After that you’ll have a new icon in your system trail with a left click you can choose one of the bookmarked Radio, while with a right click you can configure it.

In the configuration area you can add your favourite web radio, radio tray suppor聽PLS,M3U, ASX, WAX and WVX as playlist format.

For italian web radio i suggest to use what has wrote Davide Pedrelli in his article about radio tray

wget http://www.uielinux.org/dmdocuments/radio-tray/bookmarks.xml && mv bookmarks.xml ~/.local/share/radiotray/bookmarks.xml

With 2 commands you’ll have a lot of italian web radio.

Check also : http://www.listenlive.eu/ for a panoramic on the european web radio and http://www.shoutcast.com/ for a worldwide panoramic.