To listen to the radio in Linux in a simple way we have an application called Shortwave, of which recently has appeared its version 3.0. It is built with GTK and Rust and is part of GNOME through the circles initiative.
It is obvious that we are dealing with an application that performs a very specific task and that does not give much room to create something revolutionary. Moreover, it can even be said that for some time now we have been living in an era in which innovation at the level of desktop applications has been scarce, often with more aesthetic changes (yes, very elaborate in some cases) than real technological revolutions. However, this does not mean that Shortwave 3 does not bring interesting things.
For starters, we have support for GNOME 42’s dark mode thanks to the fact that Shortwave is an application built with GTK 4. Consequently, the aesthetic theme has been updated to use the new Adwaita design that can be seen in the aforementioned version of the desktop environment (at least in its base implementation).
Another new feature is the new option to add private stations in the library that are not available on radio-browser.info, but on a local network or are paid streams. From this release the application is able to display the bitrate of the station, which can also be used as an option to sort the library. From now on it is possible to save a station’s data to disk to keep it in case it is deleted from the online database.
Continuing with more Shortwave 3 stuff, the new button on the search page allows to sort the results, the station dialog has been revised to provide clearer information, the desktop notification has been modified to update instead of generating a new notification for each song (thus getting closer to what local audio file players do) and the application can be used even if radio-browser.info is not available or not working.
Shortwave makes available some 30,000 radio stations from all over the world thanks to its reliance on the radio-browser.info database. In addition to its default GTK look and feel, it has a mini-player mode that reduces the window size and gives it an old-time radio look and feel. The application, which is released under the GPLv3 license, can be easily and simply obtained in Flatpak format via Flathub.
flatpak install https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave.flatpakref
