Today, after nearly two years of development I’m very proud to say: The first stable version of Shortwave is now available! I have put a lot of time and effort into this project, now it is finally time to make it available for everyone :-).
What is Shortwave?
Shortwave is an internet radio player that provides access to a station database with over 25,000 stations.
Automatic recording of songs
When a station is being played, everything gets automatically recorded in the background. You hear a song you like? No problem, you can save the song afterwards and play it with your favorite music player. Songs are automatically detected based on the stream metadata.
Streaming
It’s possible to stream the audio playback to a network device, which implements the Google Cast protocol (e.g. Chromecast). So you can easily listen to your favorite stations e.g. from a TV.
Adaptive interface
The interface of Shortwave is completely adaptive and adapts to all screen sizes. So you can use it on the desktop, but also on your Linux (not Android!) based smartphone.
Access to a huge database
Shortwave uses the internet service radio-browser.info as station database. It contains more than 25,000 stations. This ensures that you will find every radio station, whether a known or an exotic one.
System Integration
Shortwave integrates into the GNOME Shell, by providing a MPRIS applet and a proper PulseAudio implementation.
Gradio???
… is definitely dead now. But don’t worry, you can migrate the data easily to Shortwave.
Gradio: Application Menu -> “Library” -> “Export” -> “Gradio Database Format”
Shortwave: “Import stations from Gradio”
Download
Shortwave is already available to download from Flathub!
Or install it with:
flatpak install flathub de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave
Have fun with it! And many thanks to all who supported me during the development. Especially the fabulous GNOME Podcasts team 🙂
I really like it. I only have one issue — if I try to save the song the App creates an ogg file in my music folder but it has 0 bytes. Am I doing something wrong?
I tried Antenne Bayern and Rock Antenne … same result.
Oh no. A bug has slipped in 🙁 Thanks for the hint!
It seems that only certain streams are affected.
I’m going to publish a small bugfix update later today, which is going to fix this issue.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Shortwave/issues/446
And it’s fixed! Just published 1.0.1 on Flathub 🙂
Just run: flatpak update -y
Congratulations!
I’ve been using the beta for some time, do I get an automatic update or should I uninstall that and install from the stable flathub repo?
As far I know you have to uninstall the beta, and install the stable release manually.
Well written blog post, I’m sure this has demanded a lot of work to develop the app. Keep up the good work!
Would it be possible to export both the song history and the now playing to their own text files, or a way to read them externally?
I use obs on linux for dedicated streaming pc and would love to use this for background music and would like to be able to have both a song history list I can export and a now playing overlay.
it would be much appreciated
Not directly, but everything which gets recorded is available in this path:
/home//.var/app/de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave/cache/Shortwave/recording
Maybe you can write a small script, which reads the content of this folder.
I have installed it on Linux and generally like it quite a bit! But, why are there so few stations? For instance, Calm Radio has dozens of free stations, but many are not shown. ‘Solo Guitar’, my favorite, is not there. ‘Solo Guitar and Piano’ is not there either, yet ‘Solo Piano’ is. They are all available on any of the three other internet radios I have (from two different manufacturers). Also available on Tune In Radio.
Regards,
Gord
You can add missing stations here: 😉
http://www.radio-browser.info/gui/#!/add
It would be awesome to add this functionality into Shortwave where it it can add to both Shortwave and Radio Browser.
Thanks, will do.
Gord
Just gave it a try on Fedora 30, Gnome shell: It appears in the “Applications” menu under “Others” (not “Sound & Video” where I’d expect it). Anyway, clicking on the desktop item, nothing happens.
Found the .desktop in the system-wide flatpak directory. When starting manually from the console with:
usr/bin/flatpak run –branch=stable –arch=x86_64 –command=shortwave de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave
it launches. Hmm…
The background recording sounds like a very interesting feature – save things after you listened to them! I coded something similar, cmd-line, many years ago but totally forgot about it; hah! Looking forward to play more with yours!
Terminal=true in the .desktop seems to do the trick…
The save track feature is just awesome!
Very good software, a little long to build maybe but it’s worth it.
Except that cleaning is required!
https://imgur.com/a/XuQR1Ys
Congratulations and thank you! Have been an avid user of Gradio. This is even better!
wonderful app – I love it!
How can I make it auto play a particular station on startup??
Thanks
This feature is currently not implemented yet. Feel free to open a new ticket for that feature here:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Shortwave/-/issues