Internet Radio on SMPlayer

[Member seaken64]

I don’t know if anyone here is using SMPlayer on antiX. I have found I like it better than VLC and have used it for SMTube a lot in the past. Recently I have been using it for Internet Radio in my office. I had been using streamtuner2 for internet radio from sites like Shoutcast or Internet-Radio. But I’ve been having some issue with streamtuner2 on some of my older systems that I run antiX on. So yesterday I tried to find an alternative to streamtuner2. So far I have not been too successful but I did learn how to load SMPlayer with some of the streams I had been listening to. Maybe you all know how to do this already, I don’t know. But here’s how I set up SMPlayer to play some internet radio stations.

SMPlayer has an entry on the menu that says “Radio” and upon opening that menu there is “Edit” and “Add current media” selections. While playing a stream I had launched from streamtuner2 I opened this Radio menu and selected “Add current media”. This closed the menu but when I opened the Radio menu again there was now an entry for the stream that was playing. I clicked on Edit and a new window opened up and the new entry was on the list. I double-clicked on the title and edited it to read the name of the radio station I was streaming. The URL of the site was listed in the next field. I clicked OK and saved the change. The menu again closed. When I re-opened the Radio menu my newly named radio station was on the list.

To test the stream I closed SMPlayer and re-opened. Then I pulled down the menu and opened the Radio menu and clicked on my new radio station. SMPlayer said “Starting” and the circle went around and in a couple of seconds I was listening to the station.

So, this was proof of concept. Maybe I could use SMPlayer and my internet radio player instead of streamtuner2. But how will I get all the stations I want on the list? Well, there is no easy way to import that I can find. So, what I decided to do was go to Shoutcast and download the link file and import each file one by one into SMPlayer.

On the Shoutcast website there is a download link next to each radio station. After I highlighted the station I want, for instance JazzGroove.org (East), I clicked on that download link and chose to save the file to my hard disk. I chose the .m3u format but .pls also seems to work. Then I opened the SMPlayer app and clicked on File (Ctrl-F) and browsed to the download folder. I clicked on the tunein-station.m3u file that I downloaded from Shoutcast and loaded it into SMPlayer. In a few seconds SMPlayer was playing the station. I opened the Radio menu and selected “Add current media”. Then I edited the title to match the station name from the Shoutcast site (JazzGroove) and now I had the new station on my Radio menu.

I did this with about a half-dozen radio stations that I listen to on Shoutcast. So, now I am using SMPlayer as my internet radio player directly instead of loading up streamtuner2 first. It’s working good. To see info on what is playing I open the Information and Properties dialog (Ctrl-I).

Hopefully someone will find this useful.

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