TITLE: Shell script for internet radio
DATE: 2020-03-25
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
====================================================================


I've been feeling nostalgic for a holiday I took last year to New 
Mexico in the USA. We spent a lot of time listening to country 
radio stations and driving through the beautiful scenery. While I 
am confined to home I thought it would be nice to listen to those 
radio stations again, but I was finding it laborious to listen to 
the radio through my web browser.

Most internet radio streams have a URL, which can be scraped 
usually by looking at the HTML of the webpage, or rarely if the 
radio provider is feeling public spirited, in plain text on the 
streaming page. These URLs are mostly readable by VLC if they are 
.mp3, .ogg, m3u, .pls and probably many more. The backend of VLC's 
streaming capabilities is an in-built plugin called Icecast, 
previously Shoutcast. I made a simple text file of these URLs along 
with the names of the stations:

  [VLC]: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.en-GB.html

    
https://radiostationusa.fm/apii.php?url=https://stream.revma.ihrhls.
com/zc1385,Big I 107.9 Albuquerque New Country 
    http://bbcmedia.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcmedia_radio1_mf_p,BBC 
Radio 1
    
http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/n
onuk/sbr_vlow/llnw/bbc_radio_fourlw.m3u8,BBC Radio 4 LW

Then I wrote a shell script which uses fzf to neatly display the 
radio station names, then uses sed and grep to send the URL to the 
ncurses version of VLC, which on macOS at least is stored in 
/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I ncurses when VLC is 
installed using Homebrew.

  [fzf]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

    #!/bin/sh

    stations="$HOME/.radio.txt"

    sel=$(sed 's/^.*,//' ${stations} | fzf)

    url=$(grep "${sel}" ${stations} | sed 's/,.*$//')

    vlc "${url}"

Update 2021-04-18

The BBC changed their radio streaming URLs which prompted me to 
also change how this script worked a bit. The radio streaming URLs 
are now stored in a .pls file, which makes it more compatible with 
other music players. I've included the full .pls file here because 
these URLs are hard to come by online:

    playlist
    NumberOfEntries=10

    Title1=BBC Radio 4 FM
    File1=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_radio_fourfm 

    Title2=BBC Radio 4 LW - non UK
    
File2=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_radio_fourlw_online_n
onuk 

    Title3=BBC Radio 6
    File3=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_6music 

    Title4=BBC Radio London
    File4=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_london  

    Title5=BBC World Service
    File5=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_world_service 

    Title6=WQXR 
    File6=http://stream.wqxr.org/wqxr 

    Title7=LBC
    File7=http://media-ice.musicradio.com:80/LBCNewsUK 

    Title9=BBC Radio Scotland
    
File9=http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_radio_scotland_fm 

    Title10=NTS
    File10=http://stream-relay-geo.ntslive.net/stream 

The script looks like this:

    #!/usr/bin/env sh 

    rfile=~/.radio.pls

    station=$(grep '^Title' ${rfile} | sed 
's/^Title\([0-9]\+\)=\(.*\)/\1 - \2/' | fzf | sed 
's/\(^[0-9]\+\).*/\1/')

    url=$(grep "File${station}=" $rfile | sed 's/.*=//')

    /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I rc --no-color $url

Update 2021-06-03

I was getting annoyed having to quit out of FZF and relaunch the 
script every time I wanted to change the radio station, so I 
re-wrote it to use mpv, using the --bind flag in fzf to run a 
never-ending loop. I tried to do similar using VLC, but it kept 
quitting back to FZF immediately, rather than keeping VLC open 
until I wanted to quit.

    #!/usr/bin/env sh

    rfile=~/.radio.pls

    grep '^Title' ${rfile} |\
        sed 's/^Title\([0-9]\+\)=\(.*\)/\1 - \2/' |\
        fzf --bind="enter:execute;echo {} | sed 
's/\(^[0-9]\+\).*/\1/' | 
        sed 's/\(.*\)/File\1=/' |
        grep -f - ${rfile} |
        sed 's/.*=//' |
        mpv --playlist=- ;"