View Source: RadioTuner - Waikato Linux Users Group

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A piece of [Hardware] that allows you to pick up broadcast radio on your computer.

Many TvTunerCards have a radio tuner built in.

!Tuning/Listening to the radio
You can use the "radio" application to tune and listen to radio stations. This is part of the xawtv package, but in [Debian] at least it is split into its own binary package:
<verbatim>
  apt-get install radio
</verbatim>

Here is a sample __~/.radio__ configuration file for it (based on Hamilton frequencies):
<verbatim>
 # frequencies have 6 decimal places of precision?!
 [[Stations]
 # 91.4
 91400000=Concert Radio
 # 101.0 or so
 101000000=National Radio
 [[Buttons]
 1=91400000
 2=101000000
</verbatim>

Gnome Radio is a nice gui for [GTK2] that can store frequencies and record streams onto disk as Wav, [MP3] or OggVorbis.%%%
RedHat users with Dags repo set up on Apt or yum can install `gnomeradio`


!Recording

1. Use the Gnome Radio program as above.

2. From the command line:

Step 1 - (Make sure your sound card's mixer is set to record from the appropriate device - eg from Line In if you are using a loop-back cable).

Step 2 - run the "radio" command or whatever program you use to get output to the sound card.

Step 3 - run the following commands (or put them in a script and run that). Press Ctrl-C to finish.
----
<verbatim>
 #!/bin/sh

 # -c 1 for mono

 # -s signed/-u unsigned, -w words (2byte samples)
 datatype="-s -w"

 # cd quality sample rate
 rate="-r 44100"
 # this is fine for voice recordings
 rate="-r 22050"

 # I like ogg.
 encodecmd="oggenc - -o out.ogg"
 #If you prefer mp3, you could install "gogo" and use
 #encodecmd="gogo stdin out.mp3"

 sox -t ossdsp /dev/dsp -t wav -c 1 $rate $datatype - | $encodecmd
</verbatim>
----
Note that these commands aren't really radio-specific - they could be
used for recording anything, although the settings here are ok for radio-quality audio. Also, if you use [ALSA] then you will need to have [OSS]-emulation drivers loaded.

----
!!! Troubleshooting
!!UDev
[UDev] by default (at least in Debian and Ubuntu) doesn't create a symlink for /dev/radio (to /dev/radio0), but the 'radio' program tries to use /dev/radio.

To tell udev to create a symlink, create a file called 00_video4linux.rules
in the /etc/udev/rules.d directory, with the following content:
<verbatim>
# make a symlink to the first radio device
KERNEL="radio0",        SYMLINK="radio"
</verbatim>


!!Misc
The driver for the radio tuner on the saa7134 tv tuner card seemed to have been broken for LinuxKernel 2.6.8, but works again in 2.6.9.

----
[CategoryHardware]
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Version 7, saved on Saturday, May 7, 2005 1:59:01 pm by JohnMcPherson
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