Updated 28-Jun-2024
Playing internet radio from the command line is quite a thing, especially the excellent Soma FM. Unfortunately there are some problems of late with various clients including:
- Uscheck, my favorite until this issue in October, 2021
- Rocky Madden, who also suffers from the problems of October, 2021
The best approach is to fall back to an old David Moreno perl script.
My experience underscores the problem with NPM, Brew, and plain old make scripts for installing and removing applications. I could not get NPM to remove the package, and had to navigate to the directory to delete manually. After that, I tried to install the Rocky Madden script but make failed, and the homebrew installation options were tediously long and failed as well. We then turn back the clock to install a perl script and run it in short order.
sudo apt-get install libwww-perl mplayer
git clone https://github.com/david-moreno/somafm.git
sudo cp somafm/somafm /usr/bin/
somafm --update
After this it is a matter of play your favorite channels, for example:
- groovesalad,
- gsclassic,
- illstreet,
- suburbsofgoa,
- sf1033,
- defcon,
- seventies,
- u80s,
- secretagent,
- n5md.
So many goodies, see the complete list.
SomaFM Command Line Commands
somafm -l: lists all stationssomafm -u: updates all stations (if a station is not currently present, or a seasonal station is not showing yet, such as the christmas stations).somafm STATIONNAME: plays the stationctrl-c(or whatever is set as the interrupt in the shell): stops playing
I usually create shorter script names to call the stations individually for my favorites.
Android App for SomaFM
The Alpha+ Player unofficial Soma FM client is a much better Android app than the official one, and also works well on Android TV.