Update of my radio journey + how I use VLC for online radio listening
I said in a post before that I've been trying to listening to online radios, I haven't listened a lot of it but I listen from time to time when I remember about it. Yesterday I read the latest post of Nikky about SomaFM and I returned back to online radios once more. SomaFM it's really cool and I'm glad I found out thanks to her post!
Listening to radio feels carefree, there's non to minimum ads and I just can listen whatever at any time I want, of course I can't choose the songs but sometimes I don't want to listen to something in specific and instead of recurring to some (poor) algorithm, I can tune in a radio and discover new music. Today I'm in the mood for some rock? I'll listen to a station that only plays rock, it's as simple as that.
One thing it bother me was that I had to use the media player from the online radio websites, I didn't like that all the radios I listened were distributed in different sites, I wanted to use my own media player and easily change between radios.
One day when I was randomly messing up with VLC I remembered that you can stream transmissions and put two and two together: I could listening to radio in VLC!. Since then I've been learning how to use it for this purpose. For me, VLC was not intuitive at all so I thought "why not sharing what I learned on my blog?", so in this posts I'll try to make a quick tutorial about how I set up my radio stations there :)
VLC for online radio listening
Content
Disclaimer: I'm a newbie using VLC so if something I say here it's not very accurate feel free to write me about it. I'm learning and just wanted to write down what I've found out so far.
Little introduction to online radio listening
I like VLC because it's simple, free, open source and has many features like streaming and converting files, I'm only going to focus on how to listen to radio, but you could explore more!
When you open VLC it would look something like this:
For streaming a radio you would need the stream link for it, many radios online share it but others don't, so you should be aware of that. Jpopsuki for example have it here:
Also SomaFM provides the link streams as well:
I've tried many formats and all of them works well, but the ones with the extension .pls doesn't show what song it's playing on VLC so I try to avoid those.
To quickly stream a radio you can go to: Media > Open Network Stream. Then you just put the link and click play.
And voila, you are now listening an online radio on VLC!
Doing this it's pretty easy, it doesn't take too long, but what about wanting to save this so you don't have to go open the link every time or even save multiple radios?. You can go to Media > Open recent media, but I found a better solution for this.
You can view and create playlist if you go to: View > Playlist and you'll see this
Another feature (I think it's by default since I don't remember adding it) that I like a lot in VLC is that you can find a set Radio directory in the menu to your left! it's under the Internet section, there you can find a lot of online radios of many different generes. To play a radio you just double click on it.
Media Library
A permanent way to save the radio stations is to move them into the Media library. I was so confused at first because there is no such option in the menu, but later I found that you can do this by dragging the items there. You can select the radio items you want and drag them there, it's the only way I've found so far.
Even if you close VLC, Media Library would always stay the same.
To add a radio from a stream link, you'll have to add it in the playlist section first. Go to that section, right click and select "Advanced Open" then you'd be able to open the stream link like I first mentioned in this post. When it's added to the playlist you can now proceed to drag it to the Media Library.
Create and save a radio playlist
You can add items to a playlist from the way I just mentioned or trough the Radio directory: you right click the radio option and the select "Add to playlist", you could select more than one radio if you hold Ctrl key. You can also drag the radio to the Playlist option in the side menu like you did for adding items to the Media Library.
Now when you go to the playlist, the radios you choose will be there:
You can also change the cover art and name of the radio item. Right click the item you want to edit and select "Information".
For changing the cover you'll right click on the default cover and choose "Add cover art from file", then you'll select an image.
You'll see that cover from now on when you play that radio, you can also change the playlist view mode to any other view to see the cover art as well right clicking on the playlist section empty space.
Icons would look like this for example:
Important: If you close VLC the playlist would clear up, so if you don't want that you should save it, for that you can go to: Media > Save Playlist to File or Right click and then choose that option in the context menu:
The file explorer would open, you just have to write the name and choose where to save the playlist.
I created a playlist of my favorite radios this way to have like a back up in case I forgot the names of the radios of something. It's also useful because you can share it with other people and they'll just have to open the file in VLC without having to configure anything. I recently test this, I downloaded VLC on my phone and passed the playlist file, it worked well!. I can now listen to these radios on my phone as well :)
One more thing not related to radios, it's that there are different skins you can use to customize the look of VLC! You can find more about it here. I've tried some of them, this one it's very cool:
Well, this is all I've figured out so far. This is the first tutorial/guide I've written in my life so I hope this can be helpful for someone and it wasn't confusing or hard to follow up. If you have any suggestions or questions you can email me.
Have fun listening to radios!
Thanks for reading (●'◡'●)
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