GNOME Internet Radio Locator v2.0.8 is now available
GNOME Internet Radio Locator by Norwegian developer Ole Aamot is a free radio tuner which allows you to tune into radio stations using a world map view or a handy search-box. It has been in rapid development the second half of the year with new versions being released almost weekly the last few months. Version 2.0.8, released October 7th, is worth a look if you like to listen to a small variety of international radio stations.
This news item has been updated with information from the developer.
GNOME Internet Radio Locator allows you to search for radio stations by location. You can also browse a world map and click on radio stations to listen.
The current version of GNOME Internet Radio Locator has two main features: 1) It has a search box where you can type in a city and get a auto-complete like list of radio stations you can click on or select by using the down arrow key (nothing actually happens if you type a city name and just press enter). 2) It has a world map which is rendered using OpenStreetMap's tile server with radio stations on it. It is possible to tune into a radio station on the map by clicking on it.
The amount of radio stations is, for now, somewhat limited. They are listed in a bundled file called gnome-internet-radio-locator.xml and this file is maintained by Ole Aamot himself. There is no support for using existing radio catalogs like the icecast directory or anything like that. This is sad but it would be problematic to add support for such services as they mostly lack the required geo-location data. The gnome wiki page indicates that 111 radio stations are supported. That is not a lot, but it is a good start.
"The number of radio stations is somewhat limited. It is based on manual geo-location tagging of stations discovered on the web in Emacs and tips from other people since 2014"
There are some obvious features which GNOME Internet Radio Locator v2.0.8 lacks but absolutely should have. The ability to search for more than just locations is one. You can find Radio NJR Bern by typing Bern into the search-box. However, if you try the name and not the location you get nothing. There's no results for Radio or NJR. Similarly, nothing shows up if you type in P3 to get the Norwegian regimes propaganda channel NRK P3. This does show up if you type in Oslo - but it does not appear if you try another city where it is available such as Trondheim or Bergen. It will also not appear if you try Norway even though it is a national service.
"Searching for more locations may be possible in the future. It could possibly be solved by using a search algorithm which searches for parts of location names but I have no idea how to do that in C.
Searching for station names does work in Boston where I've begun tagging station names between the <location> and </location> tags in <gnome-internet-radio-locator.xml>"
Please consider contributing the required C code if you are a C wizard.
The lack of automatic zoom when you tune into a station by searching is also disturbing. Type in Bern and tune into >Radio NJR Bern when the map is zoomed in on the United States of America and nothing changes on the map. Moving the map view to where the radio you choose is seems like obvious functionality.
"Auto-zoom when you search for stations is a features I've been trying to implement for a long time. The geocode-library appears to lack any functions for doing reverse queries on locations like "Oslo, Norway" on nominatim.openstreetmap.org in order to get decimal points (lat,lon)"
Please consider contributing the required code if you are a geo-location scientist.
The above mentioned minor flaws aside: it is a rather interesting and different radio application worth a look.
It's homepage www.gnomeradio.org has no mention of version 2.0.8 and most distributions lack it or any version of GNOME Internet Radio Locator. You will probably have to download the source file gnome-internet-radio-locator-2.0.8.tar.xz and make sure you have the required dependencies such as libchamplain-gtk-devel gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-devel geocode-glib-devel itstool and compile and install it in a regular ./configure && make -j$(nproc) && su -c 'make install' fashion if you want to try it. You can also checkout a current developer snapshop from gitlab.gnome.org.
The homepage www.gnomeradio.org and the GNOME Wiki page has some background about the development of GNOME Internet Radio Locator if you would like to learn more about it. Developer Ole Aamot has is also working on a simpler version of essentially the same program called GNOME Radio. There is a dedicated GNOME Wiki page about "Radio".
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