i used to listen to a lot of radio as a kid. i had a nokia back then, and one of those earphones that come with the phone. it had a big black button with the iconic nokia logo printed on it. i used to sit in the terrace all day so that i could listen to the radio in peace. but i only had malayalam radio stations. i always wished if there were radio stations in english or genres like EDM.

after a few years, i got access to the internet and that means i could download music and not have to listen to whatever my father’s friends sent him, or whatever was in the radio. but i didn’t know a thing about internet packs, so i spent 10 rupees for a 3 megabyte song, and since my phone’s SD card slot was busted, i could only store a single song in my phone’s meagre internal storage. and i would listen to the song for a whole month, until i would have to delete it, which was indeed very painful. sometimes the download would fail at 98%, and poof, the money is gone, and the song too.

anyway, enough talking about downloading stuff. back to internet radio. a few months ago, i started listening to internet radio stations for classical music, but i guess i was too addicted to the music-on-demand “feature” that i abandoned it after a while.

i don’t use spotify, but i have used my own stuff: raga, a jiosaavn frontend made with sveltekit, and halo , which is the same thing but made with tkinter, and i still use it once in a while.

and on phone, i have used 3rd-party apps in f-droid. but every now and then, something breaks, something stops working, playback stops and errors out all of a sudden. not the app developer’s fault though. and the incessant forks: vimusic, rimusic, kreate etc. i mean, even the dev loses interest in playing this cat-and-mouse game with corpos.

but after reading this blog on internet radio, i was excited to try it again. gnome’s shortwave is what i picked, but libadwaita…. but although gradience is orphaned, i was able to install it from the AUR. and it works!

shortwave works very well, and a feature i like is: it records music and saves it in a directory. pretty handy, i would say.