striim: Internet Radio Player for GNOME

[Mystilleef]

screenshots

Official Website

Download striim

Ubuntu GetDeb.net

Hello,

I had tremendous success seeking the Ubuntu community's help testing out scribes. Your feedback and suggestions has made it a favorite application on *nix and GNOME.

I'd like to call on the community again to help test striim. striim is an Internet radio player for GNOME. The project has languished on my computer for months. The RIAA's recent attempt to kill Internet radio motivated me to resurrect the project. You can help save internet radio.

This is the first public alpha release. The goal of this release is for testing, feedback, suggestion and general discussions. It'll be great if someone can provide a deb to make installing it easier on Ubuntu.

Your feedback is welcome.

Thanks

Installation:

At a shell terminal type the following:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Software Requirements:

Yelp 2.12
D-Bus 0.80 (Python bindings)
PyGTK 2.10
GNOME Python 2.12
python-musicbrainz2
gst-python 0.10.3 (Gstreamer 0.10.4 or better)
gstreamer0.10-plugins-base
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

(The website does not work well on IE. Please use a standards complaint browser like Firefox, Opera for now)

screenshots

Official Website

Download striim

[Technoviking]

Get the following error when trying to compile.

dbasinge@tardis:~/projects/striim-0.1-alpha$ make
Making all in data
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/dbasinge/projects/striim-0.1-alpha/data'
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `striim.desktop', needed by `all-am'. Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/dbasinge/projects/striim-0.1-alpha/data'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

[Mystilleef]

Get the following error when trying to compile.

dbasinge@tardis:~/projects/striim-0.1-alpha$ make
Making all in data
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/dbasinge/projects/striim-0.1-alpha/data'
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `striim.desktop', needed by `all-am'. Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/dbasinge/projects/striim-0.1-alpha/data'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

Thanks Mike. I've made a new release.

download

[Mystilleef]

I've updated the dependency requirements. Apparently python-dbus 0.80 is needed and you need to have gst-plugins-gnomevfs and gst-plugins-mad installed to run striim. Also made some build fixes.

Feedback is welcome.

download

[Orra]

Hi,

You've got a nice application there. It pretty much /works/, so a lot of my feedback is about how you could achieve slightly more polish.

* Aw wow! I see that you install to my applications menu *and* register a mime type. Nice.

* I'm not quite sure what the "x min" text is for. I first though it's meant to the be length of the currently playing song. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work for most of the songs/stations I've been listening to: it usually displays "1min".

* I think a Close (or OK) button on the manage stations dialog would be nice.

* Now, forgive me, but I'm a bit compulsive when it comes to polish. Did you know that you can word wrap the text in the licence dialog that you get to from the about dialog? gtk.AboutDialog.set_wrap_license(True) is what you need.

* When you click the Play button, it becomes a Pause button, and it is disabled until the radio station finishes loading. But do this: a) click the Play button; b) don't click anything else yet; c) once the Pause button's enabled, click it. The Pause button doesn't respond. I think GTK does this because the button has focus when you disable it. Maybe explicitly giving the button focus after you enable it will fix this.

* When you press the Play button, the status bar says something like "x% loading". What's weird is that it says "100% loading" for such a long time. In fact, still says this after the Pause button's been enabled.

* Being able to resize the main window would be a nice touch.


Thanks for sharing this application.

[Mystilleef]

Hello Orra,

Thanks for the feedback.

* I'm not quite sure what the "x min" text is for. I first though it's meant to the be length of the currently playing song. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work for most of the songs/stations I've been listening to: it usually displays "1min".

It's an approximation of how long you've been playing a radio station. It should update itself when the song playing changes. But I see the flaw in this design. I'll changed its behavior for the next release.

I think a Close (or OK) button on the manage stations dialog would be nice.

Oh, that's a window not a dialog. That is, you can have it open for as long as you wish while still fiddling with striim. You can press Esc to hide it when you're tired of it.

Now, forgive me, but I'm a bit compulsive when it comes to polish. Did you know that you can word wrap the text in the licence dialog that you get to from the about dialog? gtk.AboutDialog.set_wrap_license(True) is what you need.

Fantastic, I had no idea. Will change this.

When you click the Play button, it becomes a Pause button, and it is disabled until the radio station finishes loading. But do this: a) click the Play button; b) don't click anything else yet; c) once the Pause button's enabled, click it. The Pause button doesn't respond. I think GTK does this because the button has focus when you disable it. Maybe explicitly giving the button focus after you enable it will fix this.

I didn't understand this well. Do you mean you can't pause a station that is already playing? I can't reproduce this problem.

When you press the Play button, the status bar says something like "x% loading". What's weird is that it says "100% loading" for such a long time. In fact, still says this after the Pause button's been enabled.

I'll try to fix this in the next release.

Being able to resize the main window would be a nice touch.

I've tested this and it leads to very ugly artifacts because of the small number of elements in the window. So I just let GTK+ dynamically decide how best to size the window and stick with it.

I'm glad the program works for at least one person other than myself. Thanks for the feedback.

Cheers

[Mystilleef]

New Update

download

- Fix buffering feedback timings 
 - Fix feedback sensitivity in buttons 
 - Wrap license in about dialog properly 
 - build fixes 
 - performance optimizations

[Orra]

Hey again. More feedback .

Most importantly, you wouldn't believe some of the bad music I've heard testing striim. There should be some kind of check:

if artist.find("Shakira") != -1:
    raise BadMusicException

No?

* The station playing time kind of works now, but I think it could be better. I think it's weird how it starts on "1 min" instead of "0 min". Also, it only updates when the song changes. How about having a timer, and instead updating it every minute?

* This is another nitpick-compulsive-polish thing (I did warn you): when you're at the maximum volume and click the button to increase the volume, it says "increased volume" instead of "Cannot increase volume". Compare to when you try to decrease the volume from 0, where it will say "Cannot decrease volume".

* Actually, I just noticed with the decrease volume button: it doesn't work when the volume is low. Say the decrease volume button decreases the volume by n. When the volume > 0 and the volume < n, the program thinks "Oh, I can't decrease the volume by n", and so fails to decrease the volume, instead of just setting the volume to 0.

* I'll try to explain the button disable error again. Hopefully you can understand me this time :-p. Usually pause works, but not always. Say striim is playing a station. I click the pause button. Then I click the play button. The button is disabled, and then soon enabled. If I now I try to click the pause button, it does not work. But if I focus or click on any other control first, then I can click the pause button again.

Thanks again for striim--good work!

[Mystilleef]

Hey again. More feedback .

Most importantly, you wouldn't believe some of the bad music I've heard testing striim. There should be some kind of check:

if artist.find("Shakira") != -1:
    raise BadMusicException

No?

I'll pass on this.

* The station playing time kind of works now, but I think it could be better. I think it's weird how it starts on "1 min" instead of "0 min". Also, it only updates when the song changes. How about having a timer, and instead updating it every minute?

I was thinking to update every 5 mins. The accuracy of the stream duration is not important. I don't see a good reason to poll every minute. And only programmers begin counting from 0. Ordinary users start from 1.

* This is another nitpick-compulsive-polish thing (I did warn you): when you're at the maximum volume and click the button to increase the volume, it says "increased volume" instead of "Cannot increase volume". Compare to when you try to decrease the volume from 0, where it will say "Cannot decrease volume".

Will fix.

* Actually, I just noticed with the decrease volume button: it doesn't work when the volume is low. Say the decrease volume button decreases the volume by n. When the volume > 0 and the volume < n, the program thinks "Oh, I can't decrease the volume by n", and so fails to decrease the volume, instead of just setting the volume to 0.

Seems to be related to above. Will fix too.

* I'll try to explain the button disable error again. Hopefully you can understand me this time :-p. Usually pause works, but not always. Say striim is playing a station. I click the pause button. Then I click the play button. The button is disabled, and then soon enabled. If I now I try to click the pause button, it does not work. But if I focus or click on any other control first, then I can click the pause button again.

Yeap, seems like a GTK+ issue to me. You have to move the cursor away from the button then move it back on the button for the play/pause to work. I haven't figured out a fix for it, yet. Refocusing the button doesn't fix this.

Thanks for the feedback.

Cheers

[Mystilleef]

New Release Version 0.0.4

 - Swedish Translation by Daniel Nylander
- Spanking brand new volume system
- AMD64 fixes
- Better bad stream handling.
- Window visibility fix
- Album retrieval fixes
- Performance tweaks

download

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