Tune into streaming servers with Streamtuner

Jack Wallen
Apr 22, 2009
Updated • Dec 4, 2012
Music, Music and Video
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5

Streamtuner is one of those Linux applications that would most likely go unnoticed without mention. That is a shame considering how easy it makes finding and tuning into various music streams without having to touch the command or even google your favorite types of music.

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
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
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
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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Comments

  1. Justin said on November 30, 2011 at 10:18 am
    Reply

    The warning message about AAC streams when you load streams is because you don’t have the free Orban AAC/aacPlus Player Plugin installed.

    http://codecpack.co/download/Orban-aacPlus-Player-Plugin.html

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on November 30, 2011 at 10:56 am
      Reply

      Justin, thanks for the information.

  2. santosh said on December 1, 2011 at 12:43 am
    Reply

    does this support AAC ? or only mp3 streaming

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on December 1, 2011 at 1:43 am
      Reply

      I’d say it supports all pls streams but I have not tried that so cannot verify it 100%.

  3. Barnabas said on August 3, 2012 at 5:15 pm
    Reply

    Thank you Martin for a most informative and viable solution (it allowed me to play streams from a Netherland internet radio station in my WMP)! Continued success to you!

    Barnabas (USA)

  4. AppleRome said on October 7, 2012 at 7:31 am
    Reply

    Your steps’ recommendation is still valid until 7th October 2012.. Thank you very much !!

  5. Laura said on December 1, 2012 at 4:41 pm
    Reply

    Thank you!

  6. sak2005 said on December 9, 2014 at 8:03 pm
    Reply

    You must convert file.pls to file.m3u
    because file.pls open with winamp and file.m3u open with wmp.

  7. Lithium said on February 10, 2017 at 11:10 am
    Reply

    Hi
    2017 still kicking on Windows 7
    Thx a ton

  8. Dennis said on April 18, 2017 at 4:05 am
    Reply

    Hey, even i can do it, i stumbled through it and it works great! The only instruction advice i will add as i had to figure this out, when the wmp box opens that says save or open the bar on right says wmp click that drop down and select “open pls in wmp” once you do that it will work . Took me quite some time to discover that as i am no computer expert by any means. Having said that, previously i had downloaded codec packages and something about aac. None did any good. This rocks, i listen to a lot of internet radio and a number of them have dropped flash player and getting wmp to work had been a nightmare. So many thanks for this great solution to another problem that Micro-Hell will not even address. Peace- Out

  9. stephen marshall said on March 19, 2019 at 2:07 am
    Reply

    openplsinwmp came in a zip file. I unpacked it, and didn’t find anything that looks like an executable, and even the files in the “doc” folder were in a format windows didn’t recognize. I’m not stupid. you said it would open effortlessly. It didn’t. This a rabbit hole I don’t want to go down.

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