With Streamtuner you will find plenty of music genres at your fingertips waiting for you to stream them to your speakers. But just how easy is Streamtune? You will be surprised just how easy. And Streamtuner isn’t limited to Shoutcast. You can stream:

• Live365
• Xiph.org
• basic.ch
• local streams

and many more.

Getting and installing

Streamtuner should be included in your distributions’ repositories so you can open up your Add/Remove Software utility, search for Streamtuner, select Streamtune, and apply the changes.

Once stream tuner is installed you will most likely find it located in your Audio sub menu of your main menu. If you can not locate it, you can start it by issuing the command streamtuner from the command line.

How it works

Figure 1

Streamtuner is quite easy to use. Once open (see Figure 1) you navigate through the various streams, select the stream you want, and click the Tune in button. You can even record a stream (defaulting to mp3 format) by clicking the Record button.

Options

Figure 2

Streamtuner will default to whatever application you have set up to play the particular stream. By default, my installation optioned XMMS to play streams. You can, however, configure Streamtuner to use any application that will play the stream.

To configure Streamtuner to use a different application click on the Preferences entry in the Edit menu which will open the Preferences window (see Figure 2). In this window you will see the various types of Actions for Streamtuner. To change a command to handle this action double click on the particular action, delete the command used, and replace the command. You do have to know the exact command to run the application you want to use. Make sure you do keep the ” %q” suffix on the command (otherwise the application will open but not to the particular stream.)

Figure 3

From this same Preferences window you can define how many streams for each server type are loaded by clicking on the particular server plugin. By default each will load 100 available streams. You can up that by simply clicking the checkbox by the “Load at most” entry and upping the amount (see Figure 3).

Search for music

You can search for a particular genre of music, artist, song, etc within Streamtuner. To do this either click the Find entry in the Edit menu or hit the Ctrl-f key combination. This will bring up a find dialog box. Enter your search string and click Find. The resuls will appear in the main window where you can then select from the various streams. In order to do another search you first have to click the Reload button and then run your next search.This search method will only search the server type you currently in. So if you want to go from searching Shoutcast to searching Live365 you will have to click on the server tab and then run your search.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking for a means to listen to streaming music on a Linux desktop, search no further than Streamtune. It’s easy to use, reliable, and offers quite a large amount of music genres and stations to stream.

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Spotify is a service which allows users to stream many songs online free and legally. The service is ad-supported and currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. The adverts are only a minor annoyance; I find there is about 2 minutes of them per hour of music. A premium service is also available, where adverts can be removed for a cost.

The service requires a desktop client to play the music. Their client is currently only available on OS X and Windows. Using this software, users can search for music, compile playlists and listen to online radio. The music is streamed as an Ogg Vorbis at 160kbps, so it is very high quality! It also scrobbles the music to last.fm.

The advertising is tolerable. Generally, they last about 30-45 seconds and either advertise Spotify Premium or, currently, the Disasters Emergency Committee in the UK. Premium (ad-free) Spotify costs either 99p a day or £10 a month.

I am beginning to reconsider if I still have the need to download music. Most songs are available free on Spotify, with the exception of some of the newest releases on certain labels. My only problem with Spotify is that it isn’t portable, so I can’t use it on my iPod etc.

Spotify has a bigger collection of music than the ‘full tracks’ available on last.fm.

It is currently only invitation only, but I will give the first 4 people to ask an invite each. Just leave a comment asking for one.

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One program that has caught my attention in this sphere is SimplifyMedia. This is a new program which looks quite promising. How does it work? Once you download and install the application, it allows you to share your music libraries on iTunes and Winamp. You can set-up your account and share it with up to 30 friends. Of course, your work address will be one of those friends. However, since you can choose the others, you have access to a wide range of music.

The program also lets you access your library through your iPhone or iPod Touch. Just download the SimplifyMedia app for the iPhone and install it. A word of caution: your iPhone needs to jailbroken before installing the app. Then, you can use a local wi-fi connection to access your music. The iPhone integration is definitely this program’s biggest asset.

There are a few caveats. One, your host computer needs to be online or you cannot access your music. Secondly, you need to have both SimplifyMedia and iTunes running on the host machine. Thirdly, both host and target machines need a reasonably fast internet connection or the playback will be choppy, which is not pleasant for the listener. Lastly, it works only on Windows and Mac, so Linux users are left in the lurch.

The program is still in beta phase so it will definitely get better with time. I’d like to see them add support for more audio player libraries since not everyone uses iTunes or Winamp. What do you think of SimplifyMedia? Are there any features you’d like to see added? Which programs do you use to stream music over the internet?

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