CurseRadio: Listening to the Radio on the Command Line

405 words; 3 minute(s)

Table of Contents

Overview

While exploring some interesting Linux applications, I stumbled across curseradio, a command-line radio player based on Python.

This application is fantastic and incredibly easy to install, so I wanted to dedicate a post today to this app. Let's look at the features within the app and then walk through the installation process I took to get curseradio working.

Features

curseradio

The radio player itself is quite minimal. As you can see in the screenshot above, it contains a simple plaintext list of all available categories, which can be broken down further and further. In addition, radio shows are available for listening, alongside regular radio stations.

For example, the Sports > Pro Basketball > Shows category contains a number of specific shows related to Professional Basketball.

Aside from being able to play any of the listed stations/shows, you can make a channel your favorite by pressing f. It will now show up at the top of the radio player in the Favourites category.

Commands/Shortcuts

Key(s)Command
↑, ↓navigate
PgUp, PgDnnavigate quickly
Home, Endto top/bottom
Enteropen/close folders, play stream
kstop playing stream
qquit
ftoggle favourite

Installation

Dependencies

Before installing curseradio, a handful of system and Python packages are required. To get started, install python3, pip3, and mpv on your system. In this example, I'm using Fedora Linux, which uses the dnf package manager. You may need to adjust this if you're using a different system.

sudo dnf install python3 pip3 mpv

Next, use pip3 to install requests, xdg, and lxml:

pip3 install requests xdg lxml

Repository Source Installation

Once all the dependencies are installed, we can clone the source code and enter that directory:

git clone https://github.com/chronitis/curseradio && cd curseradio

Once you're within the curseradio directory, you can install the application with the provided setup.py script.

sudo python3 setup.py install

In my case, I ran into a few errors and needed to create the folders that curseradio wanted to use for its installation. If you don't get any errors, you can skip this and run the app.

sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib/python3.10/
sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /usr/local/lib/python3.10/

Run the Application

Once fully installed without errors, you can run the application!

python3 /usr/local/bin/curseradio