Raspberry Pi : listen online radio streaming

Question

I am very new to Raspberry Pi and trying to setup a headless streaming radio to listen to online radio stations (for example http://playerservices.streamtheworld.com/pls/JOSHFMAAC.pls)

I tried clementine, but seems that doesn't support free online radios, gives error about Gstreamer add-on.

I tried VLC, which works, but for some reason sound stops randomly after 10-40 minutes(some times after seconds).

Is there any other application which is stable and plays online streams? I would love to have command line controls for it so I can script with with GPIO.

Answer 1

Yes, you can use command line tools to play internet radio streams.

I have used omxplayer to play internet radio streams with no NDMI/video head.

I created certain shell scripts for station choices like Jazz, pop, etc. I would ssh into the "headless" box and start/stop playing.

You can improve by invoking shell scripts via GPIO buttons.

Answer 2

Not exactly headless (as it has a non-disable-able GUI), but Kodi supports audio streaming very well and, using plugins, can provide access to several thousand radio stations. You can control it using its JSON API via a simple web server - Flask, for example, would do a solid job of taking GPIO inputs and using them as triggers for JSON request methods.

There are many remote control client apps available, such as Yatse on Android, or the official Kodi iOS app.

Answer 3

Thanks for the feedback guys. I ended up using moode player (http://moodeaudio.org/). It uses mpd/mpc and also provides additional GUI which can be viewed in browser on same network. Then wrote simple python script which monitors GPIO and based on that switches radio stations by calling mpc funtions.