Shortwave Radio Player For Linux

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Möbius
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Shortwave Radio Player For Linux

Post by Möbius »

Shortwave

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A radio player app for Linux desktops

If you’re looking for a desktop radio player for Linux, look no further than Shortwave, an app which broadcast its first release this week.

Shortwave is the spiritual successor to Gradio, a GTK radio app you’ve likely heard of. But though Shortwave has the same key features as Gradio, it has a much nicer UI, and a more nimble code base.

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Shortwave aims to make it easy to ‘find and listen to internet radio stations’ on Linux systems like Ubuntu and Linux Mint. You don’t need any fancy equipment, or subscriptions: just open Shortwave, pick from one of hundreds of available radio stations, and tune in.

And using a dedicated internet radio app versus a more multi-purpose Linux music player like Rhythmbox or VLC, has a few distinct benefits.

First, Shortwave’s UI is dedicated solely to the task of surfacing, sorting and playing radio stations. These don’t have to compete with your other media, toolbars, and options for space; the UI is purposeful (which makes it easier to find the stations you want to tune-in to).

Secondly, the app touts ‘seamless’ integration with the GNOME Shell desktop environment.

This includes app notifications, media controls in the Message/Notification area, app-specific volume controls in the System Settings > Sound panel, and an interface that works best with Adwaita GTK theme.

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But that’s not all.

Shortwave can automatically record songs played on internet radio stations you tune into. The app uses stream metadata (and some basic common sense) to detect what’s a song and what’s not, and record and label the correct parts accordingly. Some stations don't always include this data, but there are plenty that do and stations that allow this, have a download arrow next to the track playing (which are then saved to your Music folder).

The app also boasts support for Google Chromecast, should you fancy flinging your favourite station across the airwaves and on to more devices.

Shortwave features at a glance:

Search/browse radio stations by keyword or country
Favourite stations you like
Modern GTK UI
GNOME Shell Integration
Chromecast support
Station recording feature


Shortwave is free, open source software. The source code is available on Gitlab, and the app distributed freely via Flathub as a Flatpak app which can be installed on any major modern Linux distribution such as Ubuntu and through the Software Manager in Mint.

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