FunkRadio: Your Personalized International News and Music Station

FunkRadio is a Linux bash script that brings together up-to-date international news and your favorite music. It's a laid-back way to keep yourself informed about world events while enjoying music you really prefer.

Please note that InfRadio is a script that goes on playing music and up-to-date news indefinitely: https://github.com/EloHope/infRadio

Setup

The funkRadio.sh script has been tested in Arch Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu environments. It should work on other Linux distributions as long as the following packages are installed:

• vlc (includes cvlc)
• wget
• mpg123
• ffmpeg (includes speechnorm filter)
• yt-dlp (replacing youtube-dl)
• curl
• shuf
• bc (for calculations)

After installing these packages, create new directories in your home directory:

mkdir -p ~/funkRadio ~/funkRadio/Archive ~/funkRadio/Talk

Download or copy the funkRadio.sh script into the ~/funkRadio directory and make it executable:

chmod u+x  ~/funkRadio/funkRadio.sh

Then, create log files:

touch ~/funkRadio/Archive/funkRadiolog.txt
touch ~/funkRadio/Archive/musicRadiolog.txt

If you have a music playlist in the m3u format, place a copy of it in the ~/funkRadio/ directory. The playlist should be a simple list of files. Playlists created by VLC are not suitable for this purpose.

Here is a script to make playlists on the basis of directories, album or artist names, or song duration: https://github.com/EloHope/make_playlist/tree/main

Running FunkRadio

Launch FunkRadio by typing:

~/funkRadio/funkRadio.sh

First, the FunkRadio control panel will be displayed.

FunkRadio Control Panel

The control panel presents a number of options for downloading the latest news broadcasts from various international sources. Select broadcast by typing a number and Enter. You can download several broadcasts in this way.

Start listening by typing '12' + Enter.

When listening, you can toggle between music and news by typing 'Ctrl + C'.

To turn off the radio, type 'CTRL + Z'.

Additional Information

For other ways to work with podcasts on the command line, check out these scripts:

• Bashpodder
• Bcaster
• Podsh

About the Script

The funkRadio.sh script is designed to run on a Linux system using the Bash shell. It defines several functions to download news broadcasts, play music and news, and provide an interactive control panel. The script uses the ffmpeg package's speechnorm filter (if available) to normalize sound volume in audio files of selected broadcasters.