Glossary

Each tab in the main window is a "channel". It represents one music directory service.

"stream" is a technical term which means continuosly flowing data. MP3 radio music for example is streamed, because it's not just a time-limited audio file, but unending (unless you stop the player or paying your ISP).

In streamtuner2 the terms "stream" and radio "station" are used interchangeably.

Music genres are represented as "categories" in the left pane. Every channel groups its music stations into some structure.

URL stands for "Uniform Resource Locator" and simply refers to something retrievable hyperlinks or web addresses like http://www.example.org/. Radio stations/streams are stored as URLs internally. The more generic hipster term "URI" (long superseded by "IRI" anyway) makes less sense in this context, because ISBN: or MailTo: references aren't overly useful for such purposes.

Plays music. Sometimes interrupted by advertisements.

Favicons are small symbols for websites. Most websites should have one. (ST2 downloads favicons either per menu command or automatically for the current station once you hit play.)

Radio lists are kept in "cache" files for efficiency reasons. To not redownload stream information on every category or channel flip, streamtuner2 saves this data. This avoids time consuming server requests.

Python is a programming language. It provides extensive constructs and many functions, yet is easy to learn. See python.org and Google.

MP3 (MPEG Layer 3) is an audio file format, part of the wider MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) video format. It's the most widespread format in use today, however doesn't provide the highest audio quality..

OGG is a multimedia file format. Vorbis is an audio compression format. OGG Vorbis was developed as alternative to MP3. It's often of higher quality at lower file sizes, and isn't encumbered by US software patents.

For classification of web and email content, two-factor descriptions like "audio/ogg" are advised. These are called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension types, and are used on the web in lieu of file extensions (which URL resources don't have). Note that ST2 uses the MP3 type wrong; it's officially audio/mpeg, and not audio/mp3 as shown in the settings window.

Audio streams are compressed with exactness loss. This can be heard at lower "bitrates". For MP3 files any music with less than 100 kbit/s starts to hiss, while OGG Vorbis still sounds okay at a datarate of e.g. 64 kbit per second. So while bitrate basically means file size per duration, it's commonly used as quality indicator.