Settings dialog

There are many options in streamtuner2. You can find the settings dialog in the edit menu, preferences (last entry).

It is separated into four main areas.

Player

Lists audio formats and the applications which shall be used for playing.

Display

Influences the display of all stream/station lists.

System

Filesystem and environment settings. Boring.

Channel Plugins

Every channel tab can have specific options. These are configured here. Also you can disable channels you don't need.

Player application settings

MIME types are elaborate identifiers for file types. audio/mp3 for example represents MP3 files, and audio/ogg means just OGG.

The text entry fields can hold the application name of an audio player. Often the application name is just a lower case version of the program title, but you might have to look it up.

Behind the application program name is a placeholder. If the audio player is invoked, this placeholder gets replaces with an URL (a http://..-Link) of the selected radio stream.

It's introduced by percent sign, and followed by letters. %m3u for example generates a .m3u file. Most audio players understand that. Otherwise try %pls, which might even be faster because streamtuner2 doesn't have to download and preprocess it. %srv instead gives a direct stream link.

The entry for */* is a catch-all. If the audio format of a radio station isn't know, this application gets called.

Recording

The last entry in the 'Apps' section specifies streamripper. It is used for recording stations. You might want to add some commandline -arguments here.

Display/GUI options

Most options here a self-explanatory. 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.

The number of stations setting 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 much scroll text appears in the stream lists.

"Retain deleted stations" keeps old entries, when you reload a category/genre. Shoutcast often forgets stations or throws them out. If you keep this option enabled, these entries are kept in streamtuner2. Browse down in the stations list to still see them.

It's possible to select a Gtk+ theme. But not all themes work with all Gtk display engines, and not all themes work with streamtuner2. You just have to try it.

Remembering window states makes streamtuner2 not forget which channel and category was last selected. You can however disable this option, and instead manually save the window states/layout in the edit menu, if you want.

System info

There are just a few options here, and some are hard-wired. Usually you don't want to change them.

Setting another temporary directory might be useful, if you want to keep the temporary .m3u cache files. They are created whenever you hit play. For archival or speed-up porposes you might want to keep them elsewhere. They don't take a lot of space.

Plugin and Channel settings

Each channel plugin can bring its own list of configuration settings. These are collected here.

The heading for each plugin is actually a button, which allows disabling the plugin. Alas the state cannot be easily discerned with all themes.

If you want to find out more about the short option descriptions (most settings are checkboxes), please have a look into the channels directory /usr/share/streamtuner2/channels/ and corresponding *.py files. These are readable, and sometimes contain more information.