A Raspberry Pi with Debian can be used without a monitor to listen to your favorite web radio station in a continuous operation.
Using Debian
Download the latest version of Raspbian from raspberrypi.org and extract the zip file. The Debian image is copied to a SD card using the linux command line:
sudo dd bs=4M if=2014-06-20-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/mmcblk0
While the copy process there is no visual feedback of the progress. To see this one can run the following command into an other terminal window:
sudo pkill -USR1 -n -x dd
Instructions for other operating systems are described at: Writing an image to the SD card.
Now insert the SD card into your Raspberry Pi, connect the Power and Ethernet cable. Also connect the Raspberry Pi using a 3.5 mm cable to your radio through the AUX input.
Now login into your Pi through SSH using the default user pi and password raspberry to make the base configuration and a system update:
sudo raspi-config
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Optional: free up 1 GB
By removing the Light Display Manager (lightdm) and all X11 libraries, one could free up to 1 GB of space. Be careful! The will remove the graphical interface:
sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove --purge libx11-.*
sudo apt-get autoremove
Option 1: Install radio tools
Now the needed tools mplayer and radio from the Python Package Index could be installed:
sudo apt-get install mplayer python-pip
pip install --user radio
For a simpler handling the file .bashrc could be changed. Put the following line at the end:
export PATH=$PATH:/home/pi/.local/bin
Save your changes, close the file and execute and check the changes:
. .bashrc
echo $PATH
Option 1: Listen web radio
Through the “radio” command the web radio is now accessible. To listen to the Trance channel of di.fm (and extract the real stream) the following comand could be used:
wget http://listen.di.fm/public3/trance.pls -O -
radio --add di-trance "di.fm" http://pub9am.di.fm:80/di_trance
radio di-trance
Useful mplayer commands:
q quit
9/0 lower/higher volume
maximize alsa sound output:
amixer cset numid=1 -- 400
Option 1: Run radio in background
So that the radio continues even after logout or closing the terminal, the program “screen” can be used.
sudo apt-get install screen
screen
Useful screen commands:
Ctrl-A C new Window
Ctrl-A N next Window
Ctrl-A D detach
Later, the session can be re-attached via
screen -r
Option 2: Run radio at startup (wheezy)
sudo apt-get install mplayer
Instead of using screen, you can add the following line into /etc/inittab to start the webradio at startup and restart automatically if it has crashed, for example, by a disconnect:
ra:2:respawn:/usr/bin/mplayer -nolirc -ao alsa -vo null -really-quiet http://pub10am.di.fm:80/di_trance
