 There is no shortage of really fantastic command line applications that we have available to us on Linux today I came across a really fantastic radio station player that you use right at the terminal you can play from Thousands of different internet radio stations across the world you cannot just play the radio stations You can actually record the stations if you want to this program is called radio active and today I'm going to show you how to install it and use it on a boon to 23.10 so I'm gonna pull up my VM here of the latest version of a boon to so let me pull up the Firefox browser here and Let me zoom in here. Of course. This is github. This is where the source code for radio Active is hosted. You can see radio active play and record any radio station around the globe right from your terminal And it's got pretty good Documentation here. There's a video demonstrating some of the Functionality of course you've got a table with various flags and options. You can give it It's actually not a terribly complicated program I will say though getting it to install on your system and work properly can be a chore because you have to install it using pip pip is a python related package manager because radio active being a rather new program It's not going to be in your Linux distributions repositories even on arch. I couldn't find a you are package for Radioactive so even on arch you would have to install it via pip and pip has various dependencies Not only that radio active itself also has some dependencies that you have to install to get this thing to work So let me show you how to actually get this installed. So let's go ahead and fire up a terminal So let me open the terminal and I'll zoom way in so you can see the commands I'm going to run now according to the github page how you install this should be using pip So you run the command pip 3. So this is the pip Python 3 version pip 3 install space dash dash upgrade Space and then the program name radio active and if I hit enter I'm going to get an error here on a boon to because a boon to out of the box is quite minimal It's not going to have pip already pre-installed It's not going to have a lot of python libraries already installed We're gonna have to install some stuff a boon to is not alone in this many Distributions out of the box are not going to have pip installed. So let's go ahead and install pip using the apt package manager So sudo apt install and the apt package manager is nice enough actually just to give us the command So I could have actually just done a copy and paste sudo apt install python 3 dash pip And it's going to install a number of dependencies for pip This will take about a minute or so to install So pip has finished installing if I up arrow to go back to my previous command pip 3 install dash dash upgrade radio active It should work now, right? Well, let's hit enter and no we actually get an error So if I move my head out of the way and scroll back up. It's going to complain Many distributions now when you try to do a pip install They're going to complain that you need to have a virtual Environment set up and it even gives you the command you need to use to set up a virtual environment for your pip programs, so I'm going to go ahead and create a Directory for this virtual environment. So python three dash M V e n v for virtual environment and then the path to some directory that's going to be the virtual environment I'm actually just going to call that v e n v. This will be in my home directory here slash home slash dt Slash v e n v would be the full path and I get an error when I try to run that command because you actually have to have the virtual environment program Installed on your system and once again The package manager here in this time python is letting us know we need python three dash v e n v that package Installed so let me do a sudo apt install python three dash v e n v So now that we have these dependencies installed we've installed pip and we've installed v e n v We should be able to actually install radioactive now So I'm going to up arrow and I'm going to go back to creating that virtual environment It should work and it looks like that command succeeded if I do it LS you will see I have a directory now called V e n v so that's that python virtual environment and now if I up arrow I Get back to the pip install dash dash upgrade radioactive command But do not run this command this way because this will not work because now we have to use this virtual environment So v e n v slash bin There's a directory called bin in the virtual environment directory and then pip pip not pip three just pip install dash dash upgrade radioactive and Now radioactive installs Just fine. So let's go ahead and try to run radioactive. So I'm going to type v e n v So the path to the virtual environment v e n v slash Ben slash radio is the name of the radioactive binary and if I don't give it any other arguments And I just hit enter and it's going to give us a little welcome message here You can see a description the creator of the program the link to the github But really nothing else if I up arrow and do the radio command space H for help You can see we actually get some of the most useful flags and options available to us One of the most useful ones is going to be the search functionality, right? Because most of the time especially when you first install this program You're going to be searching for radio stations I'm going to search and I'm going to search for any radio station that has 80s in the name I'm a child of the 80s. Well, I was actually born in the 70s But you know I grew up in the 80s So I really love 80s music and you can see we get a table here of The search results here. I'm going to zoom out so the table looks correct. It gives us a hundred Results here for the search term 80s and in the first column you have an ID and the ID Which you can do if I scroll back you can see type the result of the ID to play So maybe I want to play ID 100 here big R radio 80s FM. So 100 but before I hit enter on this I want to make sure to Turn the sound off or at least make it very low because of obviously this music would be copyrighted I don't want to get a strike here on YouTube But if I hit enter on a hundred it's going to start playing it set in a boom to Especially the latest Ubuntu, which is a really minimal install They don't even have FF M peg installed on the latest Ubuntu 23.10 now most Linux distributions are going to have FF M peg Already pre-installed because they'll already have audio players and video players that depend on FF M peg already installed But Ubuntu has no multimedia players at all installed. So let's do a sudo apt install FF M peg And now that we have that installed I'm going to up arrow again and do the Radio space dash dash search for the search term 80s. I get the same search results I'm going to type 100 for the ID of the station to play give it a couple seconds And I should start hearing some music. I'm pretty sure it is playing you guys probably can hear it I hope not but I can turn it up to where I can hear it. Yeah, it's definitely playing now If I hit Q for the next command Q to quit it terminates that stream So it basically kills that radio station from playing. So that's essentially the most common usage probably for Radioactive here one thing I could do if I go back and search for the same search term 80s And I do 100 to play that stream The next command I could perform would be how about F for favorite And you can see current station added to your favorite list. That's right. There is a favorite list Q to quit that stream from playing and if I up arrow and do the radio command space dash dash List you can see we have a table now of our favorites anything that we've added to the favorite list and right now Of course, I only have the one radio station And if you want to play a specific radio station, maybe you already know the URL or maybe you get the URL Because you do the list command to get your favorite radio stations What I could do is I can just highlight that URL here in the terminal and I could do a control shift C to copy control shift V To paste and then radio dash dash play and then that URL and then it will just Specifically play that stream or you could go get a radio station URL off the internet Now one other thing you could do that station is playing in the background right now say I want to record that station Well, you have this command here RF for record to follow Let me hit enter on that and then it's going to ask for the output of the file name I'll just call the file output and right now It's going to start recording that station as it's playing until I stop it is going to keep forever Recording that station. It's writing that to a file called output mp3 Now I'm gonna go ahead and hit Q to quit and that and then Q again to quit out of that entirely LS and you can see There's nothing here in my home directory. Let me see where it wrote it to it wrote it By default it writes it into your music directory slash radio active very cool. So let's CD into music radioactive doing LS well LS and there is output Mp3 and I could test to see if it actually succeeded in recording that I don't have any multimedia players installed Well, I did install ffm pigs. So we do have the ff play command. So if I ff play output mp3 Yeah, it is playing if I turn the volume up just to verify Yeah, it was definitely recording that radio station. So let me kill that now Let me CD space dash to go back to the last directory We were in before we cd'd into music slash radioactive which would have been my home directory I'm gonna up arrow one more time And let's get the dash dash help list or Instead of typing all that out a simple H would have also given us some help information But H gives us the short form dash dash help gives us this nice Tabled layout of all the commands and you can see there's some things you can do for adding a favorite By the way, sometimes you want to clear your favorites list and there is the dash dash flush command for that So if I up arrow and do dash dash list, this is a list of all our favorites and say I have I don't know 10 50 stations whatever it happens to be is a favorite list But maybe I want to clear that favorites list and start all over well I could do Dash dash flush and all entries in the favorite list have been deleted now when I run dash dash list You can see your favorite station list is below, but you have no favorite stations So that's just a little bit of what you can do with this really neat little python program rather new Radioactive you can find it on github. I'm gonna link to their github in the show description I will say it's under active development So I'm sure a lot of things are Changing underneath the hood with each new release so be prepared for some changes in future releases Now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode and of course I'm talking about the producers of the show gave James Matt Paul West armor dragon commander angry George Lee met those Nate Erion Paul peace arch and fedora realities for less red prophet role and so last three tools Debra Ward into an Ubuntu and Willie these guys They're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick look at the command line radio station player Radioactive it wouldn't have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen All these names you're seeing on the screen right now These are all my supporters over on patreon I don't have any corporate sponsors if you like my work I want to see more videos about Fantastic free and open-source software like radioactive subscribe to distro tube over on patreon peace guys The 80s was clearly the best decade for music