Tuner

Minimalist radio station player

Discover and Listen to your favourite internet radio stations.

Contributors wanted!

I've started Tuner in May 2020 when COVID-19 began to change our lives and provided me with some time to finally learn things that I couldn't during my life as a professional developer.

I moved from macOS to Linux as a daily driver, learned a little about Linux programming, and chose Vala as the language for Tuner. At the time I was running elementary OS, and they have excellent documentation for beginning developers on how to build nice-looking apps for elementary. That helped me a lot to get started with all the new stuff.

At the time, I never expected Tuner to be installed by the thousands on other great distros, like Arch, MX Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora. In August 2020, I released Tuner as a Flatpak app, and it was installed over 18.000 times on Flathub alone ever since! Users began to send me their appreciations but also bug reports and feature requests. Some friendly contributors made Tuner available on MX Linux and Arch AUR repos.

Maybe it was around this time when I started to feel not only the euphoria that comes with Open Source projects but also the weight of responsibility. I feared to move on because I didn't want to break things, so I took a break :-).

Yet, users keep sending bug reports and feature requests. I want Tuner to live on and be the best tiny internet radio receiver for the Linux environment.

You can help translate Tuner into your language

Tuner translations are now hosted on Weblate. Please help by translating Tuner into your language or fix any translation issues.

Thanks to the Weblate team for generously hosting Tuner for free.

Would you be interested in joining the project as a developer or package maintainer?

Things I need help with:

• Deeper integration into the GNOME desktop environment (DBus and such)
• Development of new features for Tuner (skills: Vala/C)
• Create and maintain Tuner packages for distros. Do you know how we can get Tuner into some official repos?
• Help me fixing those Flatpak bugs users are reporting
• Translate Tuner into more languages

Interested? Please open an issue or drop me an email.

Installation

Flathub

Tuner is available asa Flatpak on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.louis77.tuner

elementary OS

Install Tuner via elementary's App store: https://appcenter.elementary.io/com.github.louis77.tuner

Arch Linux / AUR

Arch-based GNU/Linux users can find Tuner under the name tuner-git in the AUR:

$ yay -S tuner-git

Thanks to @btd1377 for supporting Tuner on Arch Linux!

MX Linux

MX Linux users can find Tuner by using the MX Package Installer (currently under the MX Test Repo tab for MX-19 and the Stable Repo for MX-21)

Thanks to SwampRabbit for packaging Tuner for MX Linux!

Pacstall

Pacstall is a totally new package manager for Ubuntu that provides an AUR-like community-driven repo for package builds. If you already use pacstall you can install Tuner:

$ pacstall -I tuner

If you have Ubuntu and want a clean build of Tuner on your system, consider using pacstall instead of Flatpak if you don't feat beta software. Get pacstall here:

https://pacstall.dev

Motivation

I love listening to radio while I work. There are tens of tousands of cool internet radio stations available, however I find it hard to "find" new stations by using filters and genres. As of now, this little app takes away all the filtering and just presents me with new radio stations every time I use it.

While I hacked on this App, I discovered so many cool and new stations, which makes it even more enjoyable. I hope you enjoy it too.

Features

• Uses radio-browser.info radio station catalog
• Presets various selection of stations (random, top, trending, genres)
• Save favourite stations
• Sends a click count to radio-browser.info on station click
• Sends a vote count to radio-browser.info when you star a station
• DBus integration to pause/resume playing and show station info in Wingpanel

Upcoming

• More selection screens (Popular networks, Country-specific)
• More filter options (country)
• Community-listening: see what other users are listening to right now
• Other ideas? Create an issue!

Environment Variables

• TUNER_API - a : separated list of API servers to read from, e.g.
  • export TUNER_API="de1.api.radio-browser.info:nl1.api.radio-browser.info"; com.github.louis77.tuner

Build, Maintance and Development of Tuner

Building, developing and maintianing Tuner is detailed seperately and in detail in the DEVELOP markdown.

Support

Feature request, observations and Issues can be documented with tickets on Github

Known Issues

If AAC/AAC+ streams don't play (found on Elementary OS 6) install the following dependency:

$ sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-libav

'Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"'

Running Tuner from the CLI with flatpak run com.github.louis77.tuner may produce a message like the following:

Gtk-Message: 10:01:00.561: Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"

This relates to Gtk looking for Xapp (which isn't used by Tuner) and can be ignored.

Credits

• faleksandar.com for icons and colors
• radio-browser.info for providing a free radio station directory
• @NathanBnm - French translation
• @DevAlien - Italian translation
• @albanobattistella - Italian translation
• @Vistaus - Dutch translation
• @safak45x - Turkish translation
• @btd1337 - supports Tuner on Arch Linux / AUR
• @SwampRabbit - supports Tuner on MX Linux

Free Software Foundation

I'm a member of the Free Software Foundation. Without GNU/Linux and all the great work from people all over the world producing free software, this project would not have been possible.

Update 2021-08-01: I'm no longer a member of the Free Software Foundation.

Disclaimer

Tuner uses the community-driven radio station catalog radio-browser.info. Tuner is not responsible for the stations shown or the actual streaming audio content.