Settings dialog
There are various options for streamtuner2. You can find the settings dialog in the edit menu as "Preferences" (last entry).
It's separated into three main areas.
- Player
Lists audio formats and the audio player applications, or recording tools below. It's a file type to application table. Double click an entry for editing.
- Options
Influences the display of all stream/station lists, and contains some system settings.
- 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.
Behind application names a placeholder can be used. On invocation such placeholders get replaced with an URL (a http://..-Link) or filename for the selected radio stream.
Placeholders are introduced by a percent sign, and followed by letters. %m3u for example generates a .m3u file, which most audio players understand. Otherwise try %pls, which might even be faster because streamtuner2 doesn't have to download and preprocess it. Alternatively %srv instead gives a direct stream link.
Catch-all entries like */* or a generic audio/* entry allow to configure a default player.
Recording
The second block of entries in the 'Apps' section specifies recording applications. Here streamripper is preconfigured for audio streams, and youtube-dl for Youtube videos for instance. To define a target directory, you can add commandline arguments to each. Also it's typically helpful to leave the xterm prefix on, so you can follow the processing state. (Alternatively to xterm there is x-terminal-emulator, or rxvt, gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, etc.)
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'll have to try.
Remembering window states allows streamtuner2 to reconstruct 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.
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 allows to enable or disable it. To apply changed states you need to restart streamtuner2 however.
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.