Settings dialog

The options for the favicons define if station entries should show little icons. Not all stations have one, so you might as well turn this off to conserve a little memory.

When starting to play a station, its homepage favicon is automatically retrieved in the background. It's not going to be displayed right away, but after you reload the category/station list. Alternatively use Channel ▸ Update favicons... to update all station icons at once.

Bookmarked stations will be marked with a ★ star in all other station lists / categories. That doesn't often work for the same station entry from two different channel services / tabs though.

Automatically remember window size, selected channel tab, categories, or selected station. Also keeps the width of station list columns. If disabled, you can manually save the current layout/selections via Edit ▸ Save States.

Some channels provide proper APIs to fetch station lists. Others are just websites that require scraping listings out. Most channel tabs provide two alternative methods for that. The DOM/HTML selection method is sometimes slower, but more reliable. As fallback streamtuner2 plugins often use a regex to match text. Occassionally the regex method is surprisingly more exact, because directory services often use frightful unstructured HTML. If available, both methods are tried. You can influence the order with this setting, and thus speed it up.

Constraints the length of station lists per category. The number of stations option is not honored by all channel plugins. Often it's not possible to load more or fewer station entries. Some plugins have own settings (in the 'Plugins' section) even. For the major plugins this however limits how many scrollable entries appear in the stream lists.

When enabled, keeps old station entries when updating/reloading a category/genre. Services often forget stations or throws them out when inavailable. With this option enabled, these entries are kept in streamtuner2 as strikethrough entries (often at the end of the list).

Streaming URLs in bookmarked stations get renewed on category reloads/updates. This isn't very reliable, as often station titles change together with the streaming URLs.

When playing a station that doesn't have a homepage entry, streamtuner2 tries to google the station title. The found URL is then used/kept as station homepage. (Btw, station titles like www.mymusicstation.com are automatically mapped to homepage URLs already.)

When converting online station playlists, streamtuner2 creates temporary files like shoutcast.11539398391891.m3u for your audio player. It'll keep those files around in /tmp/streamtuner2 until you quit. That speeds up switching between and reconnecting to a previous station. It's in particular necessary when you use ⏭ or ⏪ directly in your player. For %pls references your player typically usues the online-only playlist files anyway. If you disable this option, then converted pls/m3u/xspf files get recreated repeatedly.

Per default most server playlists (be they .pls or .m3u, .xpsf) are converted. All player/recording apps receive a default %pls file normally. Set this option to disable any such placeholders from the Player tab, and avoid streamtuner2 pre-downloading any m3u/pls/xspf. Instead your audio player gets passed the literal server/playlist streaming URL then.

Streamtuner2 creates temporary .m3u files - for audio players that are configured to use %m3u files instead of %pls or %srv URLs. For archival purposes you might want to set a dedicated directory for this. In recent versions streamtuner2 will create a /tmp/streamtuner2 directory for itself. (You cannot set just `/tmp` anymore, because that will be mapped to the longer name. You can trick the old behaviour with `/tmp/.` however. Don't do that unless you have a reason).

Is where streamtuner2 keeps its settings.json and channel caches, favicons, etc. You can't set this in the config dialog. This is just for display. Set the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable to adapt.

If you start streamtuner2 from a terminal window (xterm/rxvt), you can get a load of state and processing or debug infos. Enable this only for testing, as it might slow down station rendering.

Now "threading" is a somewhat technical term. It means that an application runs different tasks internally at the same time. It's used for snappier interfaces. However, it's also difficult to get right at times. In Streamtuner2 some concurrent tasks conflict with updating the Gtk3 user interface. Which is why the application may crash even on reloading station lists or when switching between categories too quickly. This is only an issue for Python3 on Gtk3 with streamtuner2. In such cases you can disable the concurrent-tasking mode. The GUI will appear slower at times, and freeze between fetching lists, but remains stable on the upside. There's also a command line flag --nt to enable this workaround.