Name

pyradio - a curses Internet radio player.

PyRadio Remote Control Server

pyradio can be controlled remotely using normal http requests either form the command line (with curl for example) or from a browser.

For this purpose, a simple web server has been integrated in pyradio; this server can be started

- automatically

Setting the Remote Control Server options ins the config file, especially setting the Auto-start Server to True, or

- manually

by pressing "\s" at the main window, selecting the desired options and pressing "s".

The options one can set are:

1. Server IP

This can either be localhost (the server will be accessible from the current system only) or LAN (the server will be accessible from any PC on the local network).

If the machine has more that one interface (network card), the actual IPs will be available for selection.

2. Server Port

This is the port the server is listening to. Any free port number between 1025 and 65535 can be set here (default value is 9998).

3. Auto-start Server

This option is available in the config only. If set to True, the server will be automatically started when pyradio starts.

After the server is up, pressing "\s" will display a window which will present both the server's Text and Web address.

Using the Web Server

Inserting the Web address displayed in the previous window in a web browser will result to loading the Remote Control Web Interface, shown in the following image (which is actually a screenshot of my mobile phone):

https://members.hellug.gr/sng/pyradio/phone.jpg

The interface consists of a header, a title field, and the commands buttons.

The idea is that while pyradio is running on the PC, people relaxing on the sofa, chilling with friends, listening to music from their favorite radio station, being able to increase / decrease the volume, change stations, etc. using their phones.

The available commands are "encoded" in the buttons shown on the screen; the right part of the image shows the output of the "Stations List" button. To start a station, I would just click (well, tap) on its name, and viola!

The Web interface will show the song's title in the title field, if availabe, or the name of the station that's playing, if it's not.

In order to achieve this functionality, javascript is heavily used, so one should keep that in mind (in case javascript has been disabled in the browser, for example).

Web Interface buttons

The buttons shown in the web interface are:

Local Playlist

This button will permit the user to toggle between opening a local playlist (default state) and a RadioBrowser “playlist”, actually a search result set of players.

Play Next and Play Previous

The buttons title says it all… Subsequent clicks on a button will only be accepted after the player has “settled”, i.e. either started playing or failed to connect to the station.

Play Hist. Next and Play Hist. Previous

Same as above, but stations will come from the “station history” instead of the current playlist.

Toggle Playback

Nothing more to say here; start/stop the player.

Volume Up and Volume Down, Save Volume, Mute Player

These are the volume adjustment, saving and muting the player functions.

Recording

Toggle recording button. Its caption indicates whether recording is enabled or disabled. Its background color indicates whether a file is currently being recorded (a station is being recorded), in which case the button's background color is green. If the color is red, no file is being recorded.

Show Stations

Clicking this buttons will present the list of stations in the current playlist (or search result). Clicking on a station name will start its playback.

Show Groups

This will display, and permit the selection of the groups defined within a playlist. When a group name is selected, the list of players will be opened and scrolled to the beginning of the group.

Show Playlists

This will show a list of the playlists already composed by the user. Clicking on a playlist’s name will open the playlist; the stations will be available through the Show Stations.

When RadioBrowser is active, the button’s label will change to Show Searches. When clicked, the list of existing search items will be presented to the user; clicking on an item will preform the search and results can be displayed by clicking on the Show Stations button.

No new items can be inserted using the web interface.

Enable Title Log

This will enable or disable the titles logging function.

Like Title

This will “like” the current (song).

System Info

This will display useful info about pyradio.

Navigating through RadioBrowser results

Using the Text Server

Why having the Text interface as well, one might ask...

Well, first of all it's lighter, then one can use it to locally control pyradio from a script and provide a way to adjust the volume for example, using some assigned shortcut key combination.

Inserting the Text address on a terminal using curl or wget or any similar software:

or

would result to displaying the list of available commands:

PyRadio Remote Service
Global Commands
Long Short Description
______________________________________________________________________________
/info /i display PyRadio info
/volume /v show volume (text only)
/set_volume/x /sv/x set volume to x% (text only)
/volumeup /vu increase volume
/volumedown /vd decrease volume
/vulumesave /vs save volume
/mute /m toggle mute
/log /g toggle stations logging
/like /l tag (like) station
/title get title (HTML format)

Restricted Commands (Main mode only)
______________________________________________________________________________
/toggle /t toggle playback
/playlists /pl get playlists list
/playlists/x /pl/x get stations list from playlist id x
(x comes from command /pl)
/playlists/x,y /pl/x,y play station id y from playlist id x
/stations /st get stations list from current playlist
/stations/x /st/x play station id x from current playlist
/next /n play next station
/previous /p play previous station
/histnext /hn play next station from history
/histprev /hp play previous station from history
/open_radio_browser /orb open RadioBrowser
/close_radio_browser /crb close RadioBrowser
/list_radio_browser /lrb list RadioBrowser search items
/search_radio_browser/x /srb/x execute search item x
(x comes from /lrb)

The Restricted Commands will not work in Playlist mode; the Global Commands will work everywhere.

Examples

Text vs. Web commands

On first glance, the difference between a Text and a Web command is the /html part that exists in the later.

But things are actually more complex that that.

For example, when the /st command is issued, the server will return the list of stations as text and keep listening for connections. In this case, one request has been made to the server and one response has been returned.

Now, if the /html/st command was issued, the server will return the same list, but formatted as html, so that a browser can correctly display it.

This output would pretty much be unusable to a user issuing the "html" command on a terminal.

Furthermore, using it from a browser, clicking or tapping the corresponding button, will lead to a number of requests from the browser to the server (requesting the mute status, the player's status, the song's title, etc.).

See also

pyradio-client(1)

pyradio(1)