Internet radio is a digital audio service transmitted via the Internet. The internet radio stations have a huge advantage – you can access them from any geographic location.
Of course, you may listen to them using a variety of tools. Let us introduce you to Shortwave – one of the best apps for listening to internet radio. The good news is it’s open-source and completely free.
Shortwave is a GTK-based internet radio player written in Rust, created as the successor of Gradio, and uses radio-browser.info as its radio stations database, which features more than 30,000 radio stations.
The most important features of the app include:
- Make your library where you can save your favorite stations
- Easily search for and find new radio stations
- Songs are recognized automatically, with the option to save them individually
- Application layout that is responsive and compatible with both small and large displays
- Play audio on supported network devices (e.g., Google Chromecasts)
- Seamless GNOME desktop integration
The recently released Shortwave 3.0 brings further improvements to this already great radio player, so let’s look at them.
What’s New in Shortwave 3.0 Free Radio Player
The key difference between this version and the previous 2.0.1 is that it is now fully integrated with GNOME 42, specifically with the libadwaita to unify all applications’ views. This means you can now fully enjoy the native dark mode support in Shortwave 3.0 that the GNOME 42 desktop environment offers.
Furthermore, the application has received several practical feature improvements. For example, there is a new option in the library to add private stations that should not or cannot be found on radio-browser.info.
In other words, if you need to add internet radio stations that are on your local network or listen to ones that you have a paid membership with, you now have the option.
On top of that, Shortwave 3.0 can now display station bitrate information, which may also be used to sort stations. In addition, it is also now possible to store station data on a disk so that it remains accessible even when a station is removed from the online database.
Another key highlight of this release is the player’s notification behavior. We know that frequently popping up notifications annoys many people. Fortunately, Shortwave 3.0’s notification mechanism has been significantly altered. When a song changes, the desktop notification simply updates rather than creating a new notification for each song.
Apart from those mentioned above, a new button has been added to the search page to sort search results.
Aside from these features, Shortwave 3.0 free radio player includes other changes under the hood, which means many crashes and problems have been fixed. Moreover, it also includes revised translations for 31 languages.
Get Shortwave Free Radio Player
Shortwave 3.0 is the most recent release, and it is more stable, capable, and feature-rich than previous builds. The recommended way to install the most current version is to use Flatpak.
If you’re not familiar with Flatpak, here’s our excellent guide to everything you need to know to use Flatpak on Linux.
Flatpak command line instructions:
flatpak install flathub de.haeckerfelix.ShortwaveCode language: CSS (css)Then search for the “shortwave” in your appliance launcher and start it.
Thanks for the news. It’s cool that we can add custom URL now. So far I am using Adacious. If the new Shortwave 3 is better I may switch.
I would put knoppix or gentoo in the number four slot.
I would like an application for listening to the radio, where I can program individual stations so that they form one sequence of programs, e.g. RadioX from 8am to 10am, Radio Y from 10am to 4pm and RadioQ from 4pm to 10pm.