Goodvibes is a New Internet Radio Player App for Ubuntu

I don’t listen to the radio that often, butwhen I do it’s certainly not in thetraditional way.

Like many, I listen tointernet radio on my PC using a linux radio app. A small selection of such players areavailable. They rangefrom fully featured radio managers likeGradio, tolightweight and stripped back radio stream players like (the now defunct)Radiotray.

Radio is super convenient; tune in and you geta continuous stream of music (and oftenchat) for hours on end.

Unlike Spotify orLast.fm or Apple Music there’s nosign-up or subscription with internet radio. You don’t need to log your interests, nor is what’s played some auto-assembled playlist that triesto (and usually failsto) intelligently match your tastes.

Plus, the sheer number of and variety of stations out there means there’s something for (almost)everyone. A genre-specific station, be it classic music or talk radio, can be background noise while you focus in on somethingelse.

Goodvibes is anU buntu internet radioplayer

Goodvibes is a lightweight internet radio player for Linux. Itintegrates neatly with most desktop environments, including Unity, GNOME Shell, and Budgie. Heck, it even plays nice under Openbox and Tint2!

So how did the app come about? Well, after a stalled effort to contribute to (the now defunct) RadioTray,developer Arnaud R., decidedtowritinga lightweight radio player of his own. Goodvibes is the result of that effort.

“Once your radio stations are configured, Goodvibes get out of the way. You can close the UI, and let it run in the background, kind of “daemon mode”. You can even launch it without ui (` without-ui`), convenient if you want to auto-launch it at startup. Actually, 95% of the time, you don’t need the UI, since the desktop already provides an mpris2 applet to play the stations ― and that’s the best feature for me.”

Goodvibes compliments Gradio rather that competes with it. Look at it this way: Gradio isthe LibreOffice to Goodvibe’s AbiWord; both apps do thesame end job (play radio stations) but each takes adifferent approach to it.

Goodvibes: Features

Despite being “lightweight” the app has a decent littleset of features, including:

Ability to, edit and remove radio stations Media key support Sound Menu integration Native notifications, including song metadata (where available) Sleep inhibition during playback Command-line client with no GUI Console output

Using the app is pretty straightforward too: You open it, choose a station and play it.

Goodvibes comes pre-loaded with a small setof popular French radio stations. Naturally thesewon’t suit everyone. To edit or remove a station just right-click on it. To add an audio stationthat you listen to regularly, right-click and select ‘Add new station’.

The app can’t (currently) open .pls files like Rhythmbox can, nor does it offer a way to browse for and quickly add radio stations. It’s literally a radio player, designed to play audio streams, not aradio station browser (a service which Gradio does offer). The apprelies on you knowing (or being able to find) the URL stream of the station(s) you want to listen to.

Honestly, this isn’t much effort. Anumber of websiteslist radio stream URLs for mainstream and niche stations, including Community Radio Browser , Shoutcast and others.

Download Goodvibes for Ubuntu

Goodvibesis free, open-source software. You can visitthe Goodvibes wiki on Githubto learn more about the appand how it works.

To download and try the app for yourself on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (64-bit) you can use the official installer:

Download Goodvibes for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS